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| Does paid search ad headline length impact clicking? |
It often occurs to me that searchers take very little time when deciding whether or not to click on a paid search ad.
Heck, when I search I normally just scan headlines and look for the one that is most appealing and/or relevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for most other searchers as well.This is why Keyword Insertion Headlines work so well, and why headlines are widely regarded as the most important piece of the paid search ad anatomy.
Recently Google made headlines even more important by adding descriptions and URLs into headlines for high-scoring ads.
Headlines are so important, in fact, I often get stuck when developing new ones. What will work best? Which messages will create the best response?
So many questions. And yet, I always come back to these few: Does the length of the headline make the most impact? Are scanning users more likely to click on short, succinct, east to read headlines or those with more words?
To find out the truth for once and for all we conducted a small study using long-term paid search programs. We pulled ad results from three distinct paid search programs and grouped headlines together based on character length, ultimately splitting the headlines into 4 groups: Long (25-23 characters), Mid-Long (20-22 characters), Mid (17-19 characters) and Short (<16 characters). Ad results came from search network campaigns only and did not include KWI headlines. Below are the results:
Paid Search Ad Headline Length Effectiveness Index Study
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| Longer headlines for this paid search program were far less effective than others. Headlines between 20-22 characters generated the highest CTR. |
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| For this paid search program, headlines with short character counts worked best, while longer character counts resulted in lower CTRs. |
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| Program #3 saw the most success with headlines that hit the character limit, while shorter headlines were less effective. |
Results Analysis
Based on the results, there is little or no correlation between headline length and average click through rate. In fact, each campaign's results was drastically different from the last, with some programs seeing shorter headlines working best, and others recording more effective long headlines.What are we to conclude from this? Well, this study was a very small sample, but headline length apparently doesn't matter to users. Ultimately, it's all about the content of the headline, not the length.
At least we got that out of the way.
When developing headlines, forget about trying to keep them short and sweet, but instead focus on making them as relevant as possible to the search keywords used, use keywords in the headlines themselves, and test, test, test. The only true way to find the best performing headline is to constantly test new messages against existing.
Once again it all comes back to relevancy and testing. Shocking, I know!
