Should You Embed Your YouTube Videos on Your Site?

How to embed a YouTube video

For reasons we’ll get to in a just a moment, we recommend you examine carefully whether embedding a YouTube video on your website serves your business goals.

However, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least show you how to go about featuring a YouTube video on your site, if you choose to do so.

So, here’s what you’ll need to do:

If you want to embed your YouTube video into WordPress, Wix or Webflow, you’re in luck.
All you’ll need to do is copy the video’s url and paste it within the area you want it to appear.

If you work with a less user-friendly content management system (CMS), don’t worry.

Follow these steps:

1.

share button youtube

Click on the SHARE button at the bottom right of the YouTube video you wish to embed on your site.

2.

youtube screenshot

A pop-up screen will appear. Click on EMBED.

3.

screenshot

You can decide whether you want the YouTube player to appear on your site with or without controls,
You can also arrange for it to start at a certain when clicked on by one of your website visitors.

Once, you’re done, click COPY.

4.

Navigate back to your CMS.

Once within your editor tab, navigate to the section you want the video to appear.
Once there, use the following HTML code to embed the YouTube code you copied:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W7qWa52k-nE"
width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Your code should be placed after <iframe src=”.
Make sure to add quotation marks at the end of your pasted embed code (“).

You can play around with the width and height to have the player appear in a way that complements your webpage.

And…That’s it. You’re good to go.

If you’d like to, you can set up your YouTube video to appear without controls. This will require you to tinker around with a little bit of code. But, don’t worry.
We can show you how do it in 3 easy steps.
Click here to learn how to do it.

 

Are you flushing your videos down the tube?

02
YouTube: When and how

YouTube is awesome.
It has come a long way since the infamous early days of cat videos. It has assumed its rightful place as one of the pillars of the internet, and as the inarguable channel through which free videos can be dispersed and viewed.

You’d absolutely be making the right choice by uploading corporate videos to YouTube for 
brand discovery purposes.

 

Here’s the catch, though.

When you send prospects  to watch videos on your company’s YouTube channel, and away from your website, you commit a monumental mistake.

Instead, you’d be be far better off directing them to a controllable space; one that is hermetically-branded and consistent with your company, and that is tailored to each buyer persona. 

Let’s break it down.

03
Embedding YouTube-hosted videos

One major reason Youtube is so popular among businesses is that it allows them to embed hosted videos on corporate websites, free of charge.

Free features and services are incredibly enticing, and for good reason.
However, if opting for them comes at the expense of business results, or may actually damage your company, is it worth it?

 

YouTube embeds are not built to unlock the capabilities of a dedicated B2B video marketing platform.

 

Here are the areas in which YouTube embeds fall short:

SEO- Your mission should be to drive traffic to your site, not to YouTube.
A core tenet of any marketing strategy is driving website visitor conversion.  

Providing a customizable and on-brand experience – Your visitors expect to be met with consistent UX. YouTube does not enable you to have your video player, playlist or gallery appear synonymously with your website’s design and cadence. 

Interactivity – You can’t adding forms, clickable links, and calls to action on YouTube. You justifiably expect your videos to act as power-lifters, not just remain a static passive experience.
That really isn’t an option with YouTube.

Viewer Analytics  & Connectivity – This is the true Achilles heel of YouTube embeds.
The ability to measure your videos is almost completely absent.
Try as might, you will not be able to draw the proper data to optimize for better results.
And, it goes without saying that you cannot connect videos with your marketing or product analytics stack to make viewing data actionable.

Getting a potential lead to simply land on your site can be challenging and costly enough in itself.

This is true regardless of whether you’re using paid traffic, or have spent considerable resources on video production in the hopes of benefiting from video SEO.

Bottomline: Youtube embeds are harmful for your demand, lead-gen, and marketing strategy.

 

🚾 Flushing your video down the tube” 

When your video is a YouTube embed, you are essentially opening the door wide open for a viewer to navigate away from your website. You are are setting up prospects to fall through your fingers during a high-leverage moment.

YouTube embeds will feature a scroll, showcasing enticing videos your prospects can click on.

Alternatively, your leads can click directly on the YouTube icon, which will see them bouncing out of your site and landing on the popular search engine’s page.

Once there, they will be exposed to ads…
What if one of these happens to be one of your competitors’? 🙄

 

04
YouTube ad targeting & personalization

YouTube ad formats. Lots of ads.
YouTube ad formats. Lots of ads.

 

Google is YouTube’s parent company. It has some of the best personalization and cross-channel web-tracking capabilities on the planet.

It owns our phones, our browsers, our search engine and has employs of our era’s most brilliant minds.

Google empowers YouTube to successfully channel the infinite amounts of data regarding our online behavior to ultimately do one thing:

Deliver ads.

And very enticing ones, at that.

It’s important to remember that YouTube extends the possibility of embedding their videos on your site with an agenda in mind.

This is not to say that they have are driven by some sinister master-plan.
Far from that.

However, the video-streaming giant’s ultimate goal is to expose people to ads and generate revenue.

Those people can be your 15-year-old babysitter or your target persona in a potential $20,000/year deal.

By pulling embed viewers from your website and back to its own site, YouTube can utilize data regarding your site visitors, to better-personalize the ads it serves.

YouTube fully utilizes Google’s technology.

And, on YouTube it is always hunting season.
Your visitors, prospects and even your paying customers will almost certainly be targeted by your competitors.

 

avoid youtube ads with cincopa embedding
YouTube may be free, but it comes with a price…

 

 

05
YouTube analytics and its limitations

YouTube offers some limited metrics.

It mixes stats from channel viewed content and embedded video viewed content. Subsequently, it becomes difficult to figure out even the most basic, high-level metrics regarding video engagement (plays, unique plays, views, etc.).

Needless to say, YouTube’s analytics will not provide you with any way to discover how individual viewers interact with specific videos.

 (Click here to download our complete guide to B2B Video Marketing Analytics and learn more about viewer analytics)

video analytics

(Source)

06
The solution: A video marketing platform

When you host videos on your site using a platform, such as Cincopa’s, you essentially ‘lock’ viewers within your site. Obviously, the video must be compelling and engaging enough to hold a visitor’s attention.

However, by creating a controlled environment through which your visitors, prospects, and customers get to experience your videos, you will be significantly increasing the chances of them staying put.

Most importantly, you will stop wining and dining a prospect with content you invested time and resources on, only to inadvertently make it easier for competitors to take them away at opportune moments;  whether it be to YouTube itself (that views any visitor as a win), or to an actual, direct competitor.

07
Cincopa – a video platform for business

An industry-leading video platform, Cincopa offers a 360 solution to host, manage, customize, publish, embed, deliver and analyze your videos – built with video marketing in mind.


Let’s break some of the capabilities down:

Customization & Branding

Video Player:

Cincopa’s video player can be designed to appear completely consistent with your brand. Additionally, you can incorporate video forms and calls-to-action which pop up at defined instances. You will also be able to add annotation links that appear while the video plays.

Here’s how the player looks in action: 

Video Channels

Cincopa’s solution to keeping your visitors on your site, while watching your videos.
With Channels, you will be presenting your viewers with a Netflix-like viewing experience that is free of distractions.

It is fully customizable, and embedded on your website.

Video SEO

Automatic closed captioning and automatic SEO (JSON LD).

Video SharePage

With the SharePage you can share videos, channels, galleries, and media. You will be using a brand consistent SharePage to use on your email and SMS campaigns, social posts, product marketing, and Internal communications.

embed video on calendars

Video Portals

Remember how we lamented YouTube’s ad strategy?
Cincopa Video Portals were created to offer an elegant, on-brand, fully-hosted (shareable link) alternative to relying exclusively on your YouTube account.

 

Cincopa Video Portal
Cincopa Video Portal

 

 

A few words regarding YouTube’s security…

Once you’ve uploaded a video to YouTube, you’ve basically relinquished your control over it.
Anyone with a link to the video, can watch it.

Companies that take the security of their content seriously, cannot afford to not use a private, secure video host.

With Cincopa Video Portals, you have control over who can access and view this page.
You can limit access to users, require password submission and even integrate your SSO solution.

Embedding & Sharing

Cincopa’s platform is designed to provide maximum flexibility.
You can choose between embedding individual videos with a variety of configured players or creating and embedding playlists.
Additionally, you will be able to change content, order and visual layout without re-embedding on site.

Additional features include:

  • Flexible embeds
  • A centralized way to distribute to website and social (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn)
  • CMS integration to easily work with your web tools

Video analytics

Here’s where the magic happens.

Cincopa provides you and your business benefits with in-depth analytics regarding videos’s performance.

These help you understand each viewer interacts with specific videos.

Cincopa's Video Analytics' Dashboard
Cincopa’s Video Analytics’ Dashboard

 

Here’s a breakdown: 

  • Metrics: Understand how your embedded videos are performing on-site.
  • Video retention heatmaps: Understand how a video is behaving, where people are skipping and where lay opportunities to optimize.
  • Viewer heatmaps: Know exactly who is watching, re-watching or skipping specific parts of a video. View a small picture of an individual heatmap line of an identified viewer
  • Marketing automation integration: Sync viewing data, capture forms on video, send video emails to crush your CTR and qualify, segment and lead-score based on viewing patterns.Or, in short, convert video viewers to customers.

Video Analytics

Customer success & professional services

Have you ever tried to reach YouTube’s technical support?

If you aren’t an enormous conglomerate, there is very little chances of you getting through to someone who can assist you.

With Cincopa you always have real people you can talk with.

You can freely seek and receive expert advice, streamline yours and your team’s onboarding process, and adopt all the features which are relevant to your needs.

Cincopa even provides custom implementations and coding if you’re looking to go “outside the box”.

Video sales enablement

Remember the stop sign at the introduction? It’s there for a reason.
Sales teams sharing emails with YouTube links during their outreach and sales cycles are doing themselves and their company a major disservice.

This is a double-headed no-no: 

This essentially is a missed opportunity to allow your sales reps to track-view.
They will virtually have no way to know who’s really engaged with the the demos, webinars, success stories, and customer testimonials the send out to prospects.

Ideally, all this critical data needs to be uploaded directly into your CRM.
That way, notifications, follow up emails and follow-up tasks will automatically be triggered. These will all be based on a contact’s interaction with your videos. You can stipulate that a contact should be reached out to if he or she surpass the half-point mark of a promotional video you sent them.

With a YouTube embed, this is simply not going to be possible.

Secondly, You will be missing the opportunity to send prospects your own branded video page or channel.
Essentially, your prospects will be denied the chance to experience your videos in a controlled space, without the danger of being exposed to competitors’ ads.

 

Why confront contacts with the perilous temptation of clicking on cat videos, only to inadvertently expose them to recommended, and irrelevant content?

 

You’d be prolonging the sales cycle; that is the direct opposite of videos’ function during the buyer’s journey.

 

08
Conclusion- YouTube vs. Cincopa

Cincopa and YouTube are two very different platforms with very different purposes.
Each platform has different advantages and relies on different business models.

YouTube’s value proposition is that it’s free.
Additionally, it has a huge audience and your videos may perform well in search

Its main points of weakness are its highly limited analytics and lack of security.

In any event, it is almost always a good idea exploring uploading videos to YouTube. It’s free and can only help cultivate a higher level of awareness toward your brand.

On your site, however, a proper video hosting platform will prove far more effective in converting leads.

Cincopa allows you to completely maximize your videos’ lead generation and conversion potential. You’ll be ensuring that the video content you worked so hard to craft serves its purpose:

Encouraging your prospect to make the leap toward becoming a customer.

 

 

Create a perfect, distraction-free, and interruption-free space for your videos with Cincopa's Video Channel

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Originally published on September 4th, 2019, updated on December 5th, 2023
The Blog

Should You Embed Your YouTube Videos on Your Site?

by Yoni Yampolsky time to read: 10 min
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