Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Sounds to me like the analysts are describing a correlation, not causality. Their conclusion may be right, but it appears on the surface that your question is a good one. Ask them. And let us know what they say.

Let's ask the analysts a few questions that are a little more meaningful, shall we? Because the sort of articles you describe are pretty generic to say the least. Nor does it in any way tackle the nub of your problem "My question is how does the reader know the characteristics of the article from the headline?"

As a writer, that is your job! It is to encompass the scope of your article in as interesting manner as possible - and thus encourage further reading. You will know the tricks to get people to continue reading; however the most important part is to determine a good headline. A good copywriter will spend 40% of his time on crafting the headline.

Now: when it comes to headlines, nobody knows which is best. That is, to make this absolutely clear, nobody. No one person on this good planet can tell a good headline from another. The likes of the Readers' Digest knew this too; they sent out flyers with their periodicals. On this postcard flyer were three articles so that the readers could make a choice of their favourite. Weeks later, sacks of mail would arrive at their HQ stuffed with these postcards.

And yes, it was an expensive operation.

Not just because of the postage involved, but because it had to be sifted and collated manually. In the end, a clear favourite was established. That was the headline their readers wanted.

That is an example of the A/B (/C in this case) split test. The sort of thing that internet marketers need to get their heads around even now. Because each of those headlines was for the self same article.

So get your analytics guys to do some real research, look into what people are reading on your websites. My bet is that 25% of the pages on your site are viewed 75% of the time. That is to say, your best pages are read 3x more than the least.

Take note! This is what your audience likes, and would like more of. As with Readers' Digest, all you have to do is look at the ticks on the postcards, or in your case, your server stats.

BTW the test done by Readers' Digest was done in the 1920s. There are very few techniques in marketing and advertising that are new. Not even the fabled "right angle marketing".

It may be that you're both right. From the top-down way people navigate your site, it doesn't sound like they can tell much about the page content by seeing just a summary. However, it may be the case that the various search engines like these "inner pages" - because they're chock-full of content, and therefore are ranked higher than your competition's. Therefore, they'll get more page views based on various search engine user searches.

Readers connect when they see relevance and salience in the content. Relevant, salient content receives attention.

The 300 to 500 word "rule" is, in my opinion, nonsense.

If the text is interesting, it will get read by the people who think it's interesting.

Images, photo captions, call outs, Johnson boxes, quotations, lines of white space, and sub heads ALL help break up long articles, making them seem like less work ... which helps entice readers even more.

I agree with my colleagues that the analytics needs to improve: find the underlying third factor that drives both views and article length: could be the nature of the topic, the writer, or the structure of the article. In my experience, there are different 'ideal lengths' for articles on different themes. I recommend a more controlled testing: have the same writer on the same topic produce articles of different lenghts, and then compare the views

Cheers

Koen