Changing the headline to be more specific

The New York Times
Article
April 2016
+1677%
clicks
The New York Times hardly needs an introduction as a authoritative American daily newspaper, founded in New York City in 1851. To increase the number of readers the NYT is AB testing the headlines of its articles.

Mark Bulik, a senior editor, writes about recent tests designed to see what kind of headlines attract most readers.

“The Times generally uses the tests when a story isn’t performing as well as expected, and we have a few rules. Both headline options have to meet our standards; we don’t test clickbait versions because no headline should leave readers feeling cheated when they get to the story.”

Hypothesis

  Changing the headline to be more specific (‘The Mindset has changed’)  will increase the number of clicks 

Results

The variation resulted in 1,677 percent increase in readership.

Learnings

Headlines make a huge difference. There is so much news out there; an article needs to stand out to be read.

“We’ve learned a number of lessons from months of testing, but the most important one is pretty obvious — clear, powerful words and a conversational tone make a big difference.”


Test details

Test element Headline
Page type Article
Test date April 2016

Website information

Company The New York Times
Website www.nytimes.com
Market News
Test result
Test element Headline
Page Article
Result +1677% clicks

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