Interesting Preliminary Results On Headlines

Soon, I’ll do a large study on headlines using a list of profitable and unprofitable sites. However, I have been running some split tests and have seen some interesting results in the last week or so. The sample size is small (3 sites), but all three split tests agreed on the following factors:

1. Blue (#000080) is winning over black by a small margin on all three sites. I hadn’t expected that. I use dark blue just because I like it and the large study showed that any dark color was fine as long as it wasn’t red. Green just never appealed to me and I wanted some color in my sales letter, so I’ve been going with that dark blue. Because darkness was important in the large study, I expected black to win over blue. It’s a nice result to see that I’m not doing the 2nd place thing in this case.

2. Serif fonts (Times New Roman in the tests) are winning over sans-serif fonts (Arial in the tests). That makes no sense to me. Everyone knows that headlines should be sans-serif and regular text should be serif; right? That’s just basic typography info. In fact, I think sans-serif fonts were specifically created for headlines. Well; it appears that isn’t the case for sales copy. Times New Roman is winning over Ariel in number of conversions in three different split tests.

3. I’ve been using size 6 fonts for headlines. It’s a fairly large size and it just feels right. Size 7 is just too large. Not so say the split test results. Size 7 has an average of 24% more conversions than size 6 in the split tests I’ve been performing.

I’ll eventually do a real study on a few thousand profitable and unprofitable sites and have a conclusive answer to all three of the above questions.

I thought you might find the results interesting as I did though, so there you go… for what it’s worth.