Did Smart Phone Kill The VSL?

Not for a second.

From working with my Facebook rep, my understanding is that you cannot have auto play VSLs at all. With all the reasons you are stating, it seems to be that may be part of the issue. I would suggest that you take it off of auto play and add button controls to the video.

Was it ever alive?

I realize I'm probably in the minority, but other than for IM products - I don't think VSL's have ever been that effective.

IMHO, most buyers are NOT interested in sitting through a video sales presentation, and the VSL "hype" was primarily created by internet marketers as a way for them to pre-sell their own 1) video creation tools, 2) video playback tools, and/or 3) video plugins for Wordpress.

Did smart phones kill the VSL?

Nope, they killed the obnoxious no-controls, autoplay with the volume set to maximum VSLs that seem to be the darling of the MMO crowd. Since many of them can't hold attention any other way, they try to hijack it.

To my mind, VSLs that respect the viewer still work for things that benefit from demonstrations, which would include fitness products like those already mentioned.

The VSL is far from dead. It is becoming incresingly harder to make them successfu,l but a good one will stand the test of time. Personal opinion doesn`t come in to it. In 95% of the cases a Good VSL will out pull a good long form... a crap VSL that has no curiosity to suck a prospect in will of course fall flat...

Yes, they really kill Vsl.
Vsl isnt so effective anymore

Most VSL's can't be run off a direct link, you are likely to lose your Ad Account that way (due to VSL's having very aggressive approach in discussing weight loss, making money, etc.).

Most people are using a landing page that will then push the user to the VSL, so that it will auto-play at that point; I guess it really depends on the offer/VSL, if you had a really clean one I can see how this would definitely cripple your effectiveness.

Autoplay has been LONG disabled on smartphones and now modern browsers are no longer allowing it, no matter what your embed code is set to. Safari already has this in place and Chrome is on its way any update now.

VSL's are long from dead man! I switched all my long-form sales letters to VSL's back in 2012 and they are the norm now. I've processed millions of sales with just a simple VSL and a buy button in the parenting niche.

The rules never change... Your headline is the first indicator of conversion rate. You have to entice them to the best of your ability to click that play button.

They clicked your ad and clearly want the info, so it's second nature for them to click play to get that info from the video...

The one place you'll see videos not convert as well, is with individuals in their "golden years". Seniors and "old farts"

There is a good reason products like Old School New Body haven't switched to VSL's

The largest red flag in this thread is why you are sending FB traffic directly to an autoplay VSL and how you didn't notice until later on in the campaign your lander was messed up on mobile!

Thanks for all the input everyone. I'll admit I'm really late to the party when it comes to using VSLs. That explains why I wasn't even aware that mobile devices had disabled the auto-play feature. But the good thing is I'm in a niche that doesn't typically see a lot of them, so the saturation isn't there for my audience. I sent the traffic to a landing page that had a VSL set to auto-play. That's the way I've seen many funnels set up.

It took me a minute to see that it was happening because you don't typically see your own ad in your newsfeed. I saw mine because people were liking and sharing it,so I got the notification on my fan page.

Up to now I've had a landing/sales page with a talking head video of me, and that's made sales just sitting on the site with no paid traffic. I wanted to see what a VSL would do to increase sales, so I thought I'd run some traffic to it to get a better idea. I'll make a couple of changes and try it again. Namely changing the embed code to show the play button.

I've written a couple of blog posts about the subject so next time I'll try sending traffic to the article, then encouraging traffic to click the link from there.

Thanks again everyone!

Ron,

You should also ask if it even makes sense to send mobile traffic to a sales page. Consuming a sales pitch and ordering from a mobile is cumbersome.

Looks like your market is young and tech savvy, so perhaps it does make sense for you. But you should consult the data.

Cheers,
Colm

Did Smart Phone Kill The VSL?

No it didn't. I have had sales of Clickbank products that have VSL on smartphones and tablets. The users have to manually start the video , so the VSL should have that play button visible. Otherwise it will fall short in smart phones.

I thrive on highly compelling VSL's.

No it's not dead on smart phones but it has to have someway for your visitors to click play.

And your marketing message along with the back ground colors and Ad copy have to be very compelling also.

I have been testing one very good affiliate product that is converting very well based on the low amount is of traffic that I have been sending to the thing.

The VSL is alive and well. There's absolutely no such thing as an effective medium to communicate and sell... ever being dead.

If you think you're dependent on auto start to convert, nope. I never automatically start a VSL. It's not compliant on most ad platforms.

It's always comes down to how effective your copy is, which is a conversation for another thread.

Mark