If you are displaying videos on your website or a landing page, does it automatically start playing? Do you know if this is the correct way of doing it? While personally I’m not in favour of autoplaying videos, it can serve a purpose depending on the landing page, service or product that you are offering. Manually clicking the video to start playing is basically the standard.
Some visitors will feel irritated if your videos start playing because if you do this, you are not giving control to your visitors. Some will definitely have a negative user experience, especially if they are sitting somewhere where others are also present and their volume is turned up.
On the other hand, some brands have spent a lot of money producing great videos and they want to ensure that their visitors see their videos and so they will autoplay these.
Video autoplay or not?
I did some research to see if autoplay affects stats and especially the bounce rate because people will close the website quickly in my opinion. Does autoplay improve conversion rates because more people will actually see your message in your videos?
- Almost everyone I spoke to doesn’t like auto play. Many of these people consider them as annoying in your face advertisements.
- For specific landing pages targeting specific demographics, they work because the visitor landed on the page with a specific mindset.
Even though many people are giving negative views on autoplay, I believe as stated above with the correct landing page with relevant content and a video with autoplay designed for the page, it can actually help your conversion rates.
Do you have any experience with video autoplay on websites? If you have videos on autoplay on your website, have a look at your analytics and start testing what effects these have. Do some simple AB split testing and monitor which version are producing the best conversions.
