Embed hosted videos or Youtube videos on site

[lighttable]

Youtube is our major source of traffic.

We also have many of the same videos on our own site, self-hosted. They use the same video player as our paid video course, which allows the user to increase or decrease speed.

We're debating whether to replace these self-hosted videos with youtube embeds.

Pros:

• Increase Youtube viewcounts
• More engagement with videos (videos suggested at end of youtube videos are almost all our own)

Cons

• Possible outbound traffic to youtube.
• We can't showcase our video player's speed change function

I'm not sure how embed views are taken into account by Youtube, and how big a factor outbound traffic is. Would you suggest swapping out our self-hosted videos for embeds?

We want to maintain our Youtube channel's edge, and convince people to sign up for our course.

[sovidiu]

How about adding a cta (call to action) next to your embedded video and then doing A/B split testing in Google Analytics Experiments?

Serve 2-3 versions of the same URL to your visitors, track everything in GA Experiments and then you'll get an idea which solution is better for your site.

[lighttable]

Hmm...the main action we want people to take on the page is to watch the video. The main effect of embedding them would be to boost our view counts. But I've heard embeds don't translate 1-to-1 into increased views, and I know a lot of companies (such as SEOmoz) self-host rather than embed.

I presume there is a reason.

What kind of CTA did you have in mind? I'm not sure what question it would solve.

[ORob]

One of the things you'll hear Rand stressing lately is how enhanced your SERP result is for your site. I believe that by self hosting and properly optimizing (video sitemap and related content) you could see higher click through for pages which get a video snippet in the SERP. You take up more real estate in the results and draw the users eye in. This could get you higher CTR and in the end more video views.

[lighttable]

That's a good point. We don't currently have a video sitemap, but we could set one up.

I did see this article that suggests Youtube embeds can now achieve the same effect. Do you know if they can be made just as effective?

http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/

[ORob]

I don't see why not, if the SERP display is the same, then it should have the same chance of increasing your click through.

I would say that would be a great test. Try a few videos using embedded youtube - so you can get more views (as you stated is desired) and a few self hosted. See if you can get them both to get an enhanced SERP display and watch the traffic.

[irvingw]

If you properly code a video you host yourself on your website, you have a chance for your page to rank for that video with a thumbnail in the search results as well, giving it a better CTR than a standard link.

If you host the video on youtube, then youtube will always out rank your site, so you're sending more traffic to youtube instead of to your sites page which will convert hopefully.

Webmasters spend time and money setting up a player on their site just for this reason. If you haven't generated video image thumbnails and submitted video sitemap.xml files you haven't done what you need to do in order to see the effectiveness that hosting videos on your own platform could bring.

[lighttable]

We have the videos on Youtube right now as part of our marketing strategy. Currently, Youtube traffic is a large percentage of our referrals. We wouldn't take those videos down, even if we keep the self hosted embeds.

Does that change your answer? Our PageRank is pretty low, so I'm not sure we could outrank our competitors' Youtube videos even if we took down our own and set up a proper video sitemap.

Thanks

[PhilNottingham]

With all respect, that article is completely misleading.

While YouTube videos will almost always get indexed on your site, it does not then follow that your site is the one that ranks for them. 99 times out of 100, YouTube will outrank your site with the rich snippet.

[PhilNottingham]

If you just want the videos watched - Host the YouTube versions, but bear in mind that you'll be sacrificing rankings to your own site as a consequence.

Additionally consider that View Counts don't actually effective YouTube video's ranking position much. More important to improve visibility on YouTube.com is the user engagement (how many peopel watch the video through to the end and then thumb/comment/share it).