Almost every rule about writing headlines comes from a marketing blog quoting another marketing blog. I found a public archive of 27,616 randomised headline experiments and measured the rules myself. Most of the popular advice does nothing, and the most expensive headline habit is one nearly everybody uses.
The archive holds every A/B test the viral news publisher Upworthy ran from 2013 to 2015. Each Upworthy test showed the same article in the same place on the same day and changed only the headline wording. I kept the 10,592 tests where the picture was identical as well, so the headline wording is the only thing that changed.
Every headline element ranked by measured effect
Each row is one thing you can do to a headline, measured inside the same test against versions that did not do it.
| Element in the headline | Effect on clicks | What to do | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Names a person as "he", "she" or "they" | Up 5.7% | Write about a person, not a subject | She lost 40% of her traffic overnight |
| Hints at it with "this" or "these" instead of naming it | Up 4.7% | Use sparingly, vague pointers wear out fast | This one setting was costing me money |
| Contains a digit | Up 4.5% | Write 7, never seven | I wasted 3 years on the wrong idea |
| Negative word such as "worst" or "nothing" | Up 4.2% | Say what failed, not what worked | Nobody warned me about the second year |
| First person singular, "I" or "my" | Up 3.3% | Tell it as your own story | I shut down my app after 3 years |
| Odd number rather than an even one | No effect | Ignore the rule entirely | 7 rules and 8 rules perform alike |
| Second person, "you" or "your" | No effect | Use it if it reads better | What your audience really wants |
| Positive superlative such as "best" | No effect | Drop the superlative, it is filler | The best tool I ever used |
| The word "why" | Down 3.8% | State the reason instead | Why my launch failed |
| First person plural, "we" or "our" | Down 6.4% | Swap "we" for "I", or name the person | We are excited to share our news |
| One word in capital letters | Down 6.5% | Never use capitals for emphasis, Google re-cases titles anyway | My BEST year yet |
| Two or more words in capitals | Down 12.5% | Worse than one capitalised word, avoid entirely | My BEST YEAR yet |
| Quotation marks | Down 8.3% | Paraphrase rather than quote | "It changed everything," says founder |
| The phrase "how to" | Down 8.8% | Name the outcome, not the instruction | How to grow an audience |
| A colon | Down 9.5% | Rewrite as one sentence | Launch day: what went wrong |
| A question mark anywhere | Down 10.5% | Turn the question into its answer | Is this the end of organic reach? |
| An exclamation mark | Down 12.1% | Delete it | We finally shipped it! |
| Ends with a question mark | Down 13.5% | The most expensive headline habit, stop it | Does upload frequency matter? |
Three confidently taught copywriting rules, odd numbers, the word "you" and superlatives like "best", had no effect on clicks at all.
Ending a headline with a question mark costs 13% of clicks
Ending a headline on a question mark had the largest effect measured, up or down, and most headline guides actively recommend it.
- A headline ending in a question mark lost 13.5% of its clicks against the same headline written as a statement. That 13.5% loss held across 2,857 separate tests.
- A question mark anywhere in the headline cost 10.5% of clicks. Moving the question mark into the middle of a headline does not rescue it, so the problem is asking a question rather than stating the answer.
- Write the headline as the answer to its question, keeping the same words. "Does upload frequency matter?" becomes "Upload frequency is not a ranking factor".
Use Repeat Recorder to practise saying your lines out loud
The same words you write in a headline end up spoken in a video, a podcast intro or a pitch, and that takes practice. Repeat Recorder, one of my own apps, is a recorder built around a loop: you speak, it replays what you said, and it records your next attempt.
- Repeat Recorder runs hands free, so you can rehearse while holding a camera or standing at a whiteboard.
- Repeat Recorder lets you set how many times it replays before recording again. Hearing your own recording played back exposes the words you stumble on, and those are usually the words to cut.
- Repeat Recorder works with headphones or a Bluetooth microphone.
- Repeat Recorder supports practice in a range of languages.
A colon costs 9.5% and an exclamation mark 12.1%
Punctuation that announces the shape of a headline, instead of saying what happened, costs clicks.
- A colon in a headline cost 9.5% of clicks across 1,475 tests. "Launch day: what went wrong" loses to "What went wrong on launch day".
- An exclamation mark in a headline cost 12.1% of clicks across 845 tests, the worst punctuation mark measured after a question mark at the end. Delete the exclamation mark from "We finally shipped it!" and change nothing else.
- Quotation marks in a headline cost 8.3% of clicks across 403 tests. Paraphrase instead of quoting, so a headline quoting "It changed everything" becomes "The founder never expected it to fail this way".
The phrase "how to" costs 8.8% of clicks and the word "why" costs 3.8%
Like a colon or an exclamation mark, the words "how to" and "why" announce the format of a headline rather than what happened.
- The phrase "how to" cost 8.8% of clicks across 482 tests, the most surprising loser in the set. Name the outcome instead, so "How to grow an audience" becomes "I grew an audience with 3 posts a week".
- The word "why" cost 3.8% of clicks across 2,198 tests. State the reason instead, so "Why my launch failed" becomes "My launch failed because nobody wanted it".
- A headline that says what actually happened beats one that only promises a list, excitement, a quote, instructions or a reason.
Writing "I" gains 3.3% and writing "we" loses 6.4%
Personal voice in a headline works, but only in the singular.
- A headline using "I", "my" or "me" gained 3.3% more clicks across 3,569 tests. For example, "I shut down my app after 3 years."
- A headline using "we", "our" or "us" lost 6.4% of clicks. For example, "We are excited to share our news."
- Naming a person as "he", "she" or "they" beat both "I" and "we", gaining 5.7% more clicks. For example, "She lost 40% of her traffic overnight."
- Nobody ran a test that swapped "I" straight for "we", so the gap between the 3.3% gain for "I" and the 6.4% loss for "we" is arithmetic rather than a measured result.
A digit in a headline is worth about 4.5% more clicks
Half of the popular advice about numbers in headlines is real. Putting an actual figure in a headline does measurably help, and the form you write it in matters too.
- A headline containing a digit gained 4.5% more clicks across 3,703 tests. For example, "I wasted 3 years on the wrong idea."
- Write a number in a headline as a digit, never as a word. A live ad campaign measured 1.92% against 1.35% for the spelled-out version, so write 7 rather than seven.
Odd numbers beat even numbers by nothing at all
The rule that odd numbers win in headlines is invented, and the invention has a traceable origin.
- Headlines with odd numbers beat even numbers in 51.4% of tests, which is what a coin flip looks like. "7 rules" and "8 rules" perform alike.
- The odd numbers rule comes from one 2011 blog post whose author was the ad network's own blog editor. That 2011 blog post's only hyperlink points at an unrelated article about thumbnails, and a commenter who asked for the study was never answered.
- An analysis of 100 million headlines found nine of the twenty numbers used most in headlines were odd and eleven were even.
Negative words beat positive words in every dataset
Emotional wording in a headline does work, but whether the words are negative or positive matters far more than how strong they are. Every dataset that measured both found that negative words gain clicks and positive words do not.
- Words like "worst", "never", "nothing" and "nobody" gained 4.2% more clicks. For example, "Nobody warned me about the second year."
- Words like "best", "always", "amazing" and "perfect" had no measurable effect on clicks. "The best tool I ever used" performs like the same headline with no adjective in it.
- A study of 105,000 headlines found each negative word added 2.3% to clicks and each positive word cost 1.0%. In the 105,000 headline study, sad words gained clicks and angry words did nothing.
Anger and curiosity beat every other feeling tested
I ran ten feelings through the same 10,592 randomised tests, and the unpleasant feelings win while the pleasant ones lose.
| Feeling the headline provokes about its subject | Effect on clicks | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Disgust, words like "gross", "awful" or "horrible" | Up 7.5% | The most awful advice I ever paid for |
| Anger, words like "outrage", "furious" or "shameful" | Up 7.0% | The unfair rule nobody voted for |
| Curiosity, a vague pointer like "this", "what" or "here" | Up 6.2% | This is what nobody tells you about year 2 |
| Surprise, words like "shocking" or "unexpected" | Up 2.8% | The result was not what I expected |
| Sadness, words like "died", "tragic" or "alone" | No effect | The year I lost everything |
| Fear, words like "scary", "dangerous" or "warning" | No effect | The risk nobody warned me about |
| Urgency, words like "now", "today" or "finally" | No effect | Do this today, before it closes |
| A moral push, words like "should", "must" or "everyone" | Down 2.0% | Everyone should stop doing this |
| Awe, words like "amazing", "incredible" or "beautiful" | Down 2.9% | An incredible thing happened to me |
| Hope, words like "hope", "better", "win" or "help" | Down 8.5% | How I finally got better at this |
- Curiosity is the most certain result among the ten feelings tested, gaining 6.2% more clicks across 7,162 tests. "This is what nobody tells you" beats naming the thing outright.
- Curiosity only pays while your headline is vaguer than the headlines around it. A meta-analysis of 8,977 experiments found that adding detail helped the vaguest headlines by 5.5% and cost the already-specific ones 9.9%.
- Anger and disgust at whatever the headline is about measured strongest, at about 7% more clicks each. The anger and disgust results rest on roughly 400 tests each, so trust the direction more than the size.
- Getting shared is a different question from getting clicked. Across 6,956 New York Times articles, angry articles were shared the most, at 34% above average, while sad articles were shared 16% less.
Hope costs a headline 8.5% of clicks, and urgency gains it nothing
The pleasant and urgent feelings that copywriting advice recommends measured flat or negative in the same tests.
- Hope is the worst feeling you can reach for, at 8.5% fewer clicks across 2,586 tests. Awe words and moral push words in headlines also lost clicks, though only slightly.
- Urgency did nothing at all, despite being the most common piece of copywriting advice there is. "Now", "today" and "finally" measured 1.6% worse across 2,591 tests, close enough to zero that chance explains it.
- Sad and fearful words both had no effect on clicks in these tests, but the effect of sadness is still unresolved. A study using a properly validated word list found sadness did lift clicks, while my simpler word list found nothing.
Putting the word "you" or "your" in a headline changes nothing
Addressing the reader directly is the single most repeated instruction in headline writing. Writing "you" was measured on more tests than almost any other headline element here, and it did nothing at all.
- The words "you", "your" and "you're" measured 0.9% worse, close enough to zero that chance alone explains it. That near zero result for "you" held across 5,611 tests.
- "What your audience really wants" performs like "What audiences really want". Use the second person if it reads better and expect nothing from it.
- A pre-registered study on 24,333 headline pairs also failed to confirm that writing "you" in a headline gains clicks.
Emoji win the glance but lose the click
An emoji is an attention trick rather than a persuasion one, and grabbing attention and winning the click come apart cleanly in the data.
- An emoji only works while it is rare in the list the reader is scanning. Where emoji were scarce, a message with one took 33% of choices against 9%.
- Adding an emoji to the same subject line did not increase how often it was chosen. Adding an emoji to a subject line raised negative feeling towards the message by 26%.
- An emoji that matches the page's subject can gain clicks, but a decorative emoji loses them. A cocktail emoji on drink recipe pages gained 11.3%, while a generic star emoji across 56,730 pages lost 5.1%.
Using capitals as a highlight costs 6.5% of clicks
Capitals used to emphasise a word or to shout are the clearest loser in the whole dataset, and more of them makes it worse.
- One word in capitals cost 6.5% of clicks across 1,473 tests. "My BEST year yet" loses to "My best year yet".
- Two or more words in capitals cost 12.5% across 257 tests, nearly double the damage of one word.
- A whole headline in capitals cannot be measured here, because only 3 of 128,217 headlines did it.
- Reddit posts show capitals in a title losing too, across far more posts. Across 24.1 million posts, capitals showed up in 24.4% of winning titles against 25.7% of losing ones.
- Capitals in a title only look like a winner in Google search, and that result is false. Two split tests measured 17.5% and 7% more traffic from capitalising a title, but Google had quietly re-cased the titles, so no searcher ever saw the capitals.
On Reddit the title is very nearly the whole product
Reddit is the hardest case for a headline, because a post has no thumbnail worth looking at and no description beside its one line of title.
- Roughly 73% of Reddit votes are cast without the voter ever opening the post.
- Reddit caps a post title at 300 characters.
- You cannot edit a Reddit post title after posting.
- A Reddit title matters most in communities where posts have no picture. Across 769,698 matched pairs, a model reading only the title picked the winner 75.6% of the time on r/relationships and 58.0% on r/funny.
- Longer Reddit titles beat shorter ones, which is the opposite of the usual advice. An analysis of 24.1 million posts found the winning post had more words and longer sentences. The popular 60 character title rule was borrowed from Google's search result limit.
Use Camera to Clipboard to collect headlines you see in print
Newspapers and magazine covers are still where the best headlines are, written under a hard space limit, and they are on paper rather than on your screen. Camera to Clipboard, another of my own apps, gets a photo of a printed headline onto the computer you are writing on.
- A photo you take in Camera to Clipboard is on your computer's clipboard the moment you take it. The phone and the computer talk over your own network, with no cable and no emailing it to yourself.
- Camera to Clipboard can send several photos from the phone's library to your computer at once. A single magazine page can hold a dozen headlines.
- The photo arrives as an ordinary image on the clipboard rather than a file you have to go and find. A notes app, a document or an image editor takes it with one paste.
Ten headlines rewritten using only the measured elements
Each row takes a headline written the way the popular advice teaches, then removes the parts that measured negative and adds the ones that measured positive.
| Original headline | What was wrong with it | Rewritten | Clicks the rewrite wins back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Why Does Upload Frequency Matter? | Ends in a question mark, and uses "why" | Upload frequency is not a ranking factor | About 17% |
| You Won't Believe What We Found! | Exclamation mark, plus we | I found 8 broken images on my own site | About 19% |
| How To Write A Headline: 7 Amazing Tips | "How to" and a colon, plus a superlative | 7 headline rules that measured as nothing | About 18% |
| Tips: How To Grow Your Audience | A colon and how to | I grew an audience with 3 posts a week | About 18% |
| Our BEST Product Ever Is Here | Capitals, plus we and a superlative | I rebuilt the thing I got wrong last year | About 14% |
| Is This The End Of Organic Reach? | Ends in a question mark | Organic reach fell to almost nothing this year | About 14% |
| "It Changed Everything," Says Founder | Quotation marks | The founder never expected it to fail this way | About 8% |
| We Are Excited To Announce Our News | "We" twice, and nothing specific | I shut down the product after 3 years | About 6% |
| Why You Should Care About This | Uses why, and names nothing | She lost 40% of her traffic in one update | About 4% |
| The Ultimate Guide For You | Superlative and "you", both measured as nothing | Nobody warned me about the second year | About 3% |
Each "clicks the rewrite wins back" figure adds up the measured effect of the headline parts that were swapped out, so treat it as a rough guide rather than a promise.
Conclusion: every measured rule as one checklist
Every element that measurably moved the click rate, in one place. The numbers are the median change against the same headline without that element, across the same randomised tests.
Put these in the headline
- Describe a situation the reader will find disgusting. Up 7.5%
- Describe a situation that will make the reader angry. Up 7.0%
- Provoke curiosity with a vague pointer like "this" or "these". Up 6.2%, the most certain gain measured
- Name a person as "he", "she" or "they". Up 5.7%
- Put a digit in it, written as 7 rather than seven. Up 4.5%
- Use a negative word such as "worst", "never" or "nothing". Up 4.2%
- Write "I" or "my" rather than a company voice. Up 3.3%
- Say the outcome was unexpected. Up 2.8%
Take these out of the headline
- A question mark at the end. Down 13.5%
- Two or more words in capitals. Down 12.5%
- An exclamation mark. Down 12.1%
- A question mark anywhere at all. Down 10.5%
- A colon. Down 9.5%
- The phrase "how to". Down 8.8%
- Hopeful words such as "hope", "better", "win" or "help". Down 8.5%
- Quotation marks. Down 8.3%
- Even one word in capitals. Down 6.5%
- The words "we", "our" or "us". Down 6.4%
- The word "why". Down 3.8%
- Awe words such as "amazing", "incredible" or "beautiful". Down 2.9%
- A moral push such as "should", "must" or "everyone". Down 2.0%