Why You Should Optimise Your Videos for Mobile

A decade ago, the idea of mobile phones becoming more powerful than your desktop PC would’ve seemed crazy, but until recently this has started to take effect. According to this study from comScore, mobile has recently risen to become the leading digital platform.

You may have heard the term ‘mobile optimisation’ before; it basically means improving your website to allow it to perform well on mobiles and tablets. Video optimisation is quite similar, but it focuses on the video itself rather than the website. Here are the things you should consider when optimising your videos:

User Experience

This mainly links to general mobile optimisation, but if you have a landing page that uses video, this is still necessary. The first thing to consider should be ensuring that your landing page loads quickly. Mobile users are generally quite impatient and will probably bounce if the page doesn’t load within a few seconds.

Using a mobile phone means using a smaller screen, so you need to be able fit all the content onto one page. If your website isn’t responsive then there are going to be a few issues with presentation. Things like the text, images and video players could all change in size, making it extremely irritating for the user and some information might not even be visible on the page either.

To make your site responsive, check out these tips from Google.

Embedding

Embed codes can vary depending on what platform you’re using. A lot of codes only work on desktops, but you should aim to encode your videos so they work for both desktop and mobile. The most common embedding issue is the size of the video player. On mobiles videos can appear too big, making it hard to access the play or fullscreen buttons. Luckily it’s incredibly easy to change the size of your video:

For YouTubers it is easy to change the size of your video; all you need to do is adjust some numbers in the embed code. If you look at this embed code below, you’ll see where it says width and height (they’re both highlighted). By making the numbers smaller, you’re making the video smaller, so you just have to adjust it to the right size.

If you are a Wistia user, there are options and plugins you can use to embed your video, here’s a list of one’s that you might find useful.

To make videos mobile-compatible using Vimeo, you can use an iframe embed code. Depending on what type of device you’re watching on, using this code will automatically adapt to the correct version.

Call to action

You should check that your CTAs work on a mobile screen as well as on desktop. If you’re a mobile user then at some point you’ve probably had trouble clicking an icon because it is to small, resulting in you clicking on the wrong button.

If the call to action icons are too small, this could impact upon your conversion rates. Only a few minor adjustments are necessary in order to keep your conversion rates strong. Your icons need to be big enough for a finger to touch, so make them clear and visible. This will make it easier for people to click, and it’s also more likely that they’ll see the call to action.

About the author

Dan Cliff

Dan (aka Cliff) is a Digital Marketing Assistant and social media enthusiast, involved in blogging, producing marketing videos and general office tomfoolery. If you would like to contribute to the Eden Videos blog, Dan is the man to contact.