How To Improve TV Shows/Movies Websites CTR and CR Using a Custom Player

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In this tutorial I'm going to explain a method
that I've used in the past to improve a TV Show/Movies website CTR
(Clickthrough Rate) and CR (Conversion Rate). This method simply
involves the installation of a custom player on your website, that will
enable you to take your website to the next level. This works best with
websites that use content lockers (commonly called widgets), such as
those offered by Cp4L3ad.



In addition to improving our CTR and CR, it will also help us greatly in
driving more targeted traffic and making our website look professional
and elegant.



But first, before we dive in, let me explain what these terms are.



Clickthrough Rate: is
basically a way to measure how your ads are performing. CTR can be
obtained by dividing the number of clicks on your ad, by the number of
times the ad was delivered or viewed. The ad can be anything such as a
banner, a text link, or in our case, a link to an offer that is
displayed on a widget.



For example: if your ad was viewed 100 times (impressions) and you got 5 visitors to click on it, then your CTR is 5%.



Conversion Rate: is the
percentage of visitors who complete our desired action, which in this
case will be completing an offer from the ones displayed on the widget.



For example: you successfully managed to get 100 clicks on your
offer and out of those 100 clicks, 5 visitors completed your offer, your
CR will be 5%.



It MUST be obvious to you by now why its so crucial to improve these
numbers. Logically, the higher CTR and CR you get, the higher the
earnings you'll be able to make.



Most of the time, websites that offer streams for TV Shows or Movies,
are just embedding videos from different sources. There are a lot of
sources that host these videos, such as MegaVideo, Dailymotion and Veoh.
If you ask me, it really is great that we're able to embed videos on
our websites, it saves us a lot of costy bandwidth, uploading time, and
so forth.



But here relies the problem, take an embed video from MegaVideo for
example, once the users load your page where you have the embed video,
they will be able to watch it directly from MV servers, if they click on
the player.



To overcome this, most of the webmasters set the tease time to 0 (where
the widget pops up just after the page is loaded), having this, the
visitors won't be able to tell if you really have the thing you're
promising or not. Therefore, CTR and CR decrease significantly.



Having a custom player on your website can help you in various ways. For
example, you'll be able to choose colors for the player that fit you
website's theme, customize the control bar, change skin, icons, add
playlists, modify rendering and sound options.



One of the best players that exist today is JW Player (which we'll be
setting up in this tutorial). JW Player comes with additional plugins
that REALLY helps your website in going viral. Below are some of the
coolest plugins that come with JW Player.

    Facebook It/Tweet It:
    These two plugins allow your visitors to share your videos on Facebook
    and Twitter. The user simply clicks on the icon displayed in the dock,
    clicks post, and that's it. Your video will find it's way to their
    accounts.
    G00gle Analytics Pro
    With this plugin you'll be able to track events within the player
    itself, such as how long users watch each videos, what videos are
    watched, and so forth. Collected data is passed to your Analytics
    account (This plugin uses G's Flash API).
    Sharing Plugin This plugin allows your visitors to embed your videos, or share them through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or email.


How to install JW Player for WordPress

JW Player can be installed on any website, but for the sake of this
tutorial I'll explain how to get it up and running on your WP install
(since most of websites use that platform).

    Go to your WP plugins page, and search for "JW
    Player Plugin for WordPress". Once it's installed, you'll need to
    activate it. It will then ask you to download JW Player to your
    downloads folder, so you do that as well.
    Once the player is
    downloaded you'll be able to modify it's options by clicking on JW
    Player on the left menu in your WP admin panel.
    Under the Basic
    Settings menu, you'll be able to select the default height and width for
    the player among other settings like skin and dock placement.
    Under
    the Advanced Settings menu, you can modify rendering options, sound and
    streaming options. Additionally, you can create playlists and choose
    colors that best matches your website's colors. Make sure that you don't
    mess up these settings.
    Under the Plugins menu, you'll be able
    to install additional plugins. Take the time to check out JW Player's
    website for further instructions on how to install specific plugins.



Now that we have the player installed, it's time to embed some videos!



The simplest form of JW Player's embed code looks like this:

1. [jwplayer config="mplayer" file="http://site.com/video.flv" image="http://site.com/img.jpg"]

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1. config="mplayer" this points to the default player name.
   
2. 
   
3. file="http://site.com/video.flv" should point to the location of the video you are streaming.
   
4. 
   
5. image="http://site.com/img.jpg" default image to display before the player loads.
   

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All of this sounds pretty easy, you just paste the code and it
automagically starts working! But, here's another problem, we need to
figure out a way to get the direct link to our video, since file"" param
only accepts direct link to videos.



Here's an example on how to do this.



Let's assume that you have this MegaVideo video that you'd like to embed
through your own player, the video's link is

1. http://megavideo.com/?v=25L1TJTK

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If you use this link in your JW Player embed code, it just won't work.
What we need is a direct link to where the .flv file is located. In
order to do this we'll use a service called ClipNabber.

1. http://clipnabber.com/

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Firstly, we need to load clipnabber to our browser, then we're going to
paste MV's link to the box displayed at the top of the page, and click
nab!



Once we've pasted the link to video, it will ask us to paste the whole
HTML code for the page. This can be done by pressing CTRL + U on our MV
page, then select all (CTRL + A), copy (CTRL + C), then paste the code
to clipnabber's page.



After pasting the HTML code, we need to press nab! once again.



By this time, there should be an icon labeled "Download FLV". But, we
don't want to download the flv, do we? We just need to get the direct
link of the video!



In order to do so, you can click on the icon, and select "Copy link
address". That's the direct link we'll use in our player's embed code.



The final code for the video should look like this.

1. [jwplayer config="mplayer"
   
2. file="http://www553.megavideo.com/files/fab6b76514c75a4cc6012d7094154e17/video.flv"
   
3. image="http://site.com/img.jpg"]

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Conclusion:



Now, we're able to control the videos streamed on our website in any
way. We have the full control over it and we're no longer controlled by
the video host.



At the beginning of the post, I mentioned that having a tease time of 0
seconds usually decreases both the CTR and CR. The visitors won't be
able to tell if you have what they're looking for, or not.



In my experience, having a tease time of 3-5 mins ensures that a lot of
visitors will complete whatever offer you're asking them to complete.
Because by that time, they will be watching the video already, and ready
to complete an offer to continue watching it.



So, take the time to test different tease time settings, and don't worry
about the visitors leaving your website to watch the videos from the
video host. It just won't happen anymore.



Feel free to share your experiences or ask any questions. I'll do my best to help ya guys out