GoAnimate is a video-creation tool that’s designed to help first-time or novice designers create their own video content online. It’s ideal for beginners who are just dipping their toes into the world of animation, but it’s also being adapted for use by small businesses that are on a tight budget. But how valuable is video content in online advertising, and how effective is GoAnimate as part of a small business’s online advertising strategy? In this edition of “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll find out.
First things first: Let’s discuss how useful videos are to online advertising in general. As one of the 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, multimedia (including images and videos) is known to be a content quality signal. That means webpages with multimedia elements may see an increase in their overall Quality Score. On top of that, search results with video thumbnails have a 41% higher click-through rate, according to an aimClear study cited on the Shareaholic blog. Videos also increase the amount of time visitors stay on your domain, which Google refers to as “dwell time.” A high dwell time increases your Page Authority, and, according to a 2013 study by Moz, Page Authority is the #1 ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. In other words, on-page videos are significantly valuable to any online advertising campaign.
Now, how helpful is GoAnimate in creating these videos? It varies depending on your creativity and technical savvy, but the baseline quality is rather good. A step-by-step tutorial automatically guides you through the creation process during your first video, showing you how to select backgrounds, characters, actions, and dialogue and how to create additional scenes. The tutorial remains available to you so you can easily refer to it at any point in the future. In terms of user interface, GoAnimate is intuitive, streamlined, and generally easy to use. Small business owners who have little to no experience with video editing will pick it up after playing around with it for a short time.
The finished product of GoAnimate videos leaves a little to be desired, however. While the animations are bright, clean, polished, and eye-catching, the biggest drawback is the quality of the dialogue. Unless you record your own voice for all of the different characters or pay extra for a human voice, you’ll have to settle for the free text-to-voice robot. As expected, a robot’s voice is no replacement for a human’s, and it can distract from the messaging of your video. However, you can avoid the robotic voice problem if you’re okay with just displaying text on the screen without a voice-over.
Overall, Prospect Genius reviews GoAnimate as a useful tool for business owners who want to create short commercials or informative videos for their websites. These videos can be uploaded directly to YouTube and embedded on company websites. They not only boost SEO, as explained above, but they also appeal to visitors and are a strongly persuasive medium. For $39/month, GoAnimate’s cheapest package, the advantages are definitely worth it.
Next time on “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll examine Google Trends, the new tool that provides information about local consumer behavior and interests for advertising purposes.