Hosting a webinar

Hosting a webinar is a great way to engage with your audience. But what happens after the live session ends? Embedding webinar recordings on your website makes it easy for audiences to discover them. This webinar embedding guide will show you how to make your webinars a lasting part of your site's content.

What Does it Mean to Embed a Webinar on Your Website

Embedding sounds techy, but it's pretty simple. It allows visitors to watch the webinar without having to leave your site or navigate to another platform. It’s just adding a video player to your page that plays your webinar.

Here’s what it looks like when you embed a Contrast webinar on your website.

An example of an embedded Contrast webinar

Why You Should Embed Webinars on Websites

Embedding webinar recordings on your website isn't just a fancy feature; it's a strategic move. Here’s why:

• Boost Engagement: Videos are engaging. When you embed a webinar, you’re offering content that's more likely to capture and hold attention.
• Increased Time on Site: People spend more time on pages with engaging videos, which helps your search engine optimization (SEO).
• SEO Benefits: Diverse content types, including videos, are favored by search engines. Embedding videos on pages can improve your chances of ranking higher in Google search results.
• Wider Reach: People who just discovered your website won’t know that you hosted a website last week or last month. You need to tell them. Embedding webinar recordings on websites makes them discoverable to a wider audience.
• Authority Building: By sharing your knowledge through embedded webinars, you position yourself as an authority in your field. This helps build trust with your audience.
• Lead Generation: Embedding webinars can be an effective way to generate leads, especially if you include a sign-up form or call-to-action (CTA) before or after the webinar.
• Social Proof: People subconsciously look for validation from others when evaluating your company. Webinars co-hosted with other companies or influencers that are embedded on your website act as a form of social proof. The brain says, “Oh, they trust this brand, so I can too.”

How to Embed Webinars on Websites

We’re about to dive deep into how you can embed webinars on websites. We’ll explore choosing the right platform, embedding the webinar recording itself, and ensuring everything runs smoothly across all devices.

Choosing the Right Webinar Platform

Before you can embed a webinar, you need to choose a webinar platform. You want one that's not just easy to use but also packs a punch when it comes to features. Here's what to look for:

• Ease of Use: It should be simple for both you and your audience. No one likes to wrestle with complicated software. Hosting webinars and later embedding them on your website should be easy.
• Integration Capabilities: The platform should play nice with other tools. For example, Contrast’s HubSpot integration can be set up in less than 2 minutes and automatically adds webinar attendees as contacts in your CRM.
• Quality and Reliability: Look for crisp video and audio quality and reliability. You don’t want a platform that will let you down mid-webinar.
• Engagement Features: Interactive elements like polls, Q&A sessions, and chat features can make your webinar more engaging.
• Analytics: Understanding your audience's behavior is key. A good platform offers insights into viewership and webinar engagement metrics.

We’ve built a free webinar platform that ticks all these boxes. It's designed for modern, engaging webinars. It’s built for growing teams that want to scale fast. That’s why we offer unlimited seats on every plan. Even our free one.

Our Clip Ai feature automatically creates clips from webinars

How to Embed Webinar On Websites

The exact instructions might vary depending on your webinar platform and website CMS. But at a high level the steps are the same. To embed a webinar on your website, you'll start by copying the embed code directly from your webinar platform. Next, you’ll paste that embed code into an iframe or html code block on your page.

If your webinar software doesn’t automatically generate embed codes for video recordings, you’ll have to download the video first. You’ll then upload the video to a hosting and video analytics tool like Contrast or YouTube. From there, use the provided embed code to place your webinar on any page.

Contrast users can embed webinars on websites easily. Here’s how:

1. Go to your admin dashboard
2. Click on Videos
3. Click the three-dot more options icon on the video you want to embed on your website
4. Click Share
5. Click Embed and then the Copy embed code button

Contrast makes it easy to embed webinars on websites

Embed Zoom Webinar on Website

If you’re here because you’re struggling to embed a Zoom webinar on a website, you’re not alone. For a company their size, they’ve made it surprisingly difficult to embed Zoom recordings on websites.

The first option is complicated. You’ll need to get your developers or IT team to spend a bunch of time integrating their developer SDK into your site. Their other official recommendation for embedding Zoom webinars is to download the recording and upload it to YouTube.

Zoom’s official recommendation for embedding webinar recordings

We’re not fans of this approach for a few reasons. The first one is that it creates an unnecessary extra step in your workflow.

But if you are using Zoom for webinars and can’t switch to Contrast or another Zoom webinar alternative right now, you can still upload your recording to our platform instead of YouTube.

When you embed YouTube videos, you're stuck with their branding. It might not mesh well with your site's look. It can also make things feel less polished. Plus, there's a YouTube logo that takes viewers away to YouTube where you might lose their attention. After your video ends, YouTube might suggest totally unrelated videos, pulling folks away from your content. And let's not forget ads. YouTube can play ads before or during your video, which is never fun.

Testing and Troubleshooting Embedded Webinars

Always test your embedded webinar before publishing your page. Webinars embedded via Contrast will look great by default. But, we can’t speak for other platforms. So double-check that your embedded webinar is responsive on different screen sizes. Tools like EmbedResponsively are really helpful for making sure YouTube or Vimeo embeds look right.

Get Analytics for Embedded Videos

This is the second way you can embed videos for free with Contrast. It’s also the better option because it gives you access to video analytics.

All you need to do is create a free account and upload your videos there. We’ll generate an embed code for the video and also give you access to all of our video analytics. This way, you can keep an eye on metrics like views, watch time, and most watched moments.

Contrast offers free video analytics for any type of video you upload and embed

Where to Embed Webinars On Websites

There are a lot of different places you can embed webinars on websites. You want to choose spots where that are easy to find and relevant to your visitors. Here's a look at some prime locations for your webinar content.

Embed Webinars on Dedicated Landing Pages

One thing you can do is make specific pages for your webinars. Here’s an example we liked from Chameleon. They embedded their webinar on a dedicated landing page and even included short 1-2 minute highlight clips from the webinar lower down on the page for those that don’t want to watch the entire recording.

Example of an embedded webinar on a landing page

Embed Webinars in Blogs

Another great idea is to embed webinars into blog posts. If you have a relevant webinar recording for the topic being discussed in an article, you should embed it. It enriches your content and keeps readers hooked.

Embed Webinars on Product Pages

You don’t have to limit embedded webinars on your website to just content pages. You can also use webinars to showcase the products or services you sell. Those webinars can be embedded on product pages. They can help give a deeper understanding of your offering.

Embed Webinars in Resource Libraries

If you have a resource library on your website you can embed webinars there. With a Contrast account, you get a dedicated webinar channel built automatically for you. This channel serves as a home for all your webinars. This makes it easy for your viewers to find and watch your entire webinar collection in one place.

Contrast automatically builds a webinar channel for your recordings

Embed Webinars in Knowledge Bases

Adding webinars to your knowledge base and customer support articles can add value to your users. It's a smart way to show, not just tell, solutions or features. This approach can make complex topics easier to understand. It also adds an interactive element to your support articles.

Best Practices for Webinar Embedding

Embedding webinars on websites is more than just sharing content. It's about enhancing user experience. Here's what to keep in mind to do it right.

Optimize for On-Demand Views

At Contrast, we’re firm believers in the magic of live webinars. But since 63% of webinar views are on-demand, you need to make your content replay-friendly. Think long-term. Your webinar should still make sense years from now, even for folks who weren't there live.

Contrast data shows that most webinar views are on-demand

Avoid references to specific dates or events that might not make sense later. We always recommend adding polls and Q&As into webinars to make them more engaging, but keep on-demand viewers in mind when doing so. But don’t let those create overly long pauses or gaps in the content. Waiting for answers or questions to roll in might feel normal when you’re recording live. But it creates a lull in a replay view. You don’t want on-demand viewers losing attention in those moments.

SEO Tips for Embedding Webinars on Websites

As we covered, embedding webinars on websites can help with video SEO. But you need to use the right video markup language in your code to help Google detect, understand, and rank your content better. Contrast does this automatically for you, but we can’t speak for other platforms.

Here’s what you need to know if your webinar platform doesn’t handle the SEO:

Google uses the standardized Schema.org VideoObject markup to know what videos are about. You’ll add a simple code with your video's name, thumbnail URL, video URL, and upload date to your site. This information helps Google showcase your video in search results. Including a description, duration, and key moments also helps, but is not required.

You should also include text on the page about what's in your webinar. This helps search engines like Google know what your webinar covers.

FAQ about Webinar Embeds on Websites

Can I embed live webinars?

When using Contrast, your live webinars are already embedded on the same link as your registration page. We do this so that anyone invited to the webinar can find the live webinar easily.

Will embedding a webinar slow down my website?

Embedding a webinar shouldn't significantly slow down your site. We’ve tested our embedding tools extensively and know that they don’t impact page speed in any material way. Like anything though, your mileage may vary on other platforms. You can test out your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

How can I measure the success of my embedded webinars?

Your webinar platform’s built-in analytics should track views from embedded webinars, but you might have to double-check that embedded views are counted. Contrast provides detailed analytics and even shows you views specifically from embedded webinars.

Can I customize the appearance of the embedded webinar player?

When it comes to free tools, most video players are not very customizable. With Contrast’s free branded video player you can change the color, upload your own thumbnail, add video chapters, and customize the video’s title and description.

Wrapping up our Webinar Embedding Guide

Webinar embeds on websites are a powerful way to distribute your webinars to a wider audience. You're not just sharing content; you're enhancing the value of that page for your site visitors. Ready to start embedding webinars on your site? Create a free Contrast account today to upload your webinar recordings or host new webinars.