Title: Headline Length Dramatically Affects Profitability

Author: James Brausch

Article: Recently, there was a debate on a popular Internet marketing forum about headline length. Some argued that longer headlines conveyed more information and had a better chance of catching the attention of your prospect. Others argued that some headlines were so long that they became confusing and took away your breath if you attempted to read them aloud. Some claimed that extremely long headlines appeared to be run-on sentences even if they technically weren't.

I decided to do a study. In the end, I wanted to compare profitable sales pages to unprofitable ones. I wanted to see if there was a difference in their headline length.

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. If no headline existed, I skipped that site. 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.

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.

The first thing we can conclude is that profitable sales pages use longer headlines than the average sales page. That's not 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 puts me and my clients right in the center of the correlation group for profitable headlines. A headline isn't everything, but it is an important factor to consider when optimizing sales and conversion ratio. I hope you consider following suit. If so, let me know if this advice has improved your results. I look forward to hearing from you.

About the author: James D. Brausch is the creator of the Glyphius software. Glyphius copywriting software is guaranteed to increase the profitability of your copywriting using a statistical analysis of profitable ads. For more information, visit: http://www.Glyphius.com