Discover How Length Dramatically Affects Profitability!
by James D. Brausch
http://www.glyphius.com
Recently, I monitored an interesting discussion in one of
the forums about the length of headline on sales pages.
Some of the posters were in favor of longer headlines
because they communicated more information and had a better
chance of catching the interest of the prospect. Other
posters claimed that some headlines were so long that they
were confusing. Some even claimed that they would take
away your breath if you attempted to read them aloud. One
poster thought that very long headlines often appeared to
be a run-on sentence... even if it technically wasn't.
I decided it was time to do a study. I wanted to compare
headlines on profitable sales pages to headlines on
unprofitable ones. I wanted to find out if there really
was a difference in the length of their headlines.
To do that study, I first had to get a list of profitable
sites and another list of unprofitable sites. I actually
already had that due to another study. However, many of
the unprofitable sites had disappeared from the Internet.
There is no surprise in that. Why stick around if you
can't make a profit; right?
I had to settle for comparing the headlines of profitable
sales pages to the average sales page. I used my list of
profitable sites and counted the words and characters in
each headline. I skipped any site without headline. I
then looked at sites with ads running on the major search
engine for the same product or service. I randomly picked
one and also counted the words and characters in it's
headline for the control or average group.
The results were surprising. The average sales page has a
headline of only 10 words comprising 55 characters. The
profitable sales pages had and average of 14 words and 82
characters in their headlines.
We can conclude that profitable sales pages use longer
headlines than the average sales page. That isn't so
surprising.
The other finding was much more surprising. With only a
handful of exceptions in thousands of data points, a length
longer than 150 characters was very rare. Can we conclude
that extremely long headlines aren't profitable? No; there
are other possibilities. However, we can conclude that it
is exceptionally rare for profitable sales pages to use
headlines longer than 150 characters. In fact, 90% of the
data points fell within 131 characters.
That is my new recommendation. I intend to only use
headlines that are at least 80 characters long and no
longer than 131 characters and I advise the same to my
clients.
This places me right in the middle of the correlation
group for profitable headlines. Your headline is an
important factor to consider when you are optimizing
sales. I hope you consider following suit. If so, let me
know if this study has improved your results. I look
forward to hearing from you.
Submit An Article
|
