A few months ago, Dropbox changed their homepage basically a video. A video to “introduce Dropbox to the less tech-savvy population”.

It was a bold move for the big company Dropbox now is (4 million user in January 2010) , but how did it impact the business?

Well the makers of the video, Common Craft, wrote a blog post where they analyze exactly that, and they offered some data given to them by a Dropbox official:

- During the week, the video gets nearly 30k hits a day (that threshold should be crossed soon)

- In the past month, the video was viewed 750k times

- On the referral register page (the page people see when they are invited by a friend to join Dropbox), the conversion rate goes up from 30.0% to 33.2% when the video is viewed, this is probably an underestimate of the video’s actual impact (see the next note)

- In general, measuring the absolute impact of the video is a little tricky, because there are always going to be people who already know they want to sign up for/install Dropbox, and thus won’t bother to view a video. The video’s true value lies in convincing someone who wouldn’t have otherwise signed up to do so – thus I think the actual boost provided the video is even greater than the 33.2/30.0 that the previous stat might suggest, since a decent chunk of the 30% who didn’t view the video but still signed up were probably already predisposed to do so

- Overall I’m positive the existence of the video increases conversions by a hefty margin, and probably gets us several thousand signups a day that we wouldn’t have otherwise

- The video is definitely considered a core part if not the core part of our strategy for introducing people to Dropbox … I’ve personally heard from plenty of friends who said that the video helped less tech-savvy people like their parents understand the basic concept of Dropbox much, much better.

In the post, they continue by saying:

It may seem like the conversion rate rise from 30.0% to 33.2% is minor, but it’s actually a more than 10% increase in the rate of conversions.

So a slight increase but if you look at the numbers of people that come to Dropbox’s home page, we’re talking about thousands everyday. And that’s a lot.

And that’s one more example of how video is improving online businesses’ marketing, but an even more relevant one since we’re talking about a company like Dropbox!