The Results of “Which Headline Pulled Best!”
January 23, 2009 by fladlien
Filed under Uncategorized
I’m going to give you the results of yesterdays quiz as well as the winners!
First though, I want to thank everyone who participated. That means a lot to me.
Okay, now I missed -7… and so here’s who did better than me!
Robin Anthony, Rodney, Sean, Dan Klatt & Simon all missed -6 Jerry & Bert missed -5.
And the person with the best score was Alan Matthews, who only missed 4. Email me Alan, and I’ll give you a special gift – one of my products for free!
Nobody got #19 right, but Robyn and Sunshine came the closest.
Here areall the quiz answers, and explanations:
1. A. pulled more than 2 to 1. instant gratification!
2. A. gave a specific promise of benefit.
3. B. The keyword is YOU.
4. A. shows customers how much they are saving.
5. A.
6. B. pulled 20% better. spoke to a specific audience.
7. B. 27% increase in requests because of added promise of benefit
8. A Pulled 3 times better.
9. B. Pictures are usually better eye-catchers than words
10. B.
11. B. has curiosity and benefit in one headline.
12. B.
13. A. pulled 2 times as much, because message B has been repeated so often the audience was bored and few read it.
14. B. The reason the headline made sense because it tied with the fact that most volvos are driven for 11 years in Sweden. and by then it’s paid for.
15. A. pulled twice s much reader interest.
16. A. Pulled 50% better. offer free information.
17. A.
18. B. This headline was the result of asking buyers of the product WHY they bought the product, and they replied, “it feels good when my eyes are tired.”
19. They are in reverse order 5-4-3-2-1. research revealed the word “free” used its customary magic as well as the words “ho to”
20. A tie. Both pulled the same.
Takeaways from all this – a lot of time, even the best copywriter doesn’t KNOW for sure what ad will work best. You figure it out with testing. Other things to take in mind are market place awareness. In some cases, one headline SHOULD’VE out pulled another, but didn’t because the market place was burned out on those type of headlines.
Also, number 14 is real instructive, because it shows you that you absolutely must know what customer you’re writing for if you want to write really good headlines.
Thanks again for taking the quiz. I hope you found it as instructive as I did!
-Jason
Great Quiz & surprising results. I’ll go over it again to assess my results.
Thanks for the free lesson.
Congrats to Alan for winning a free product from Jason.
+Faith
How embarrassing! Or should I say, humbling?
Very educational though. And one other thing I learned is not to second-guess myself so much. I would have actually gotten a few extra points if I had gone with my gut and not tried so hard to figure out what could possibly be the right answer…
Sort of in the vein of, hmmm, I’d go with this, but we have a quiz here and they’re probably trying to trick us etc. My answer to 19 actually started out very close to correct but then I thought, no, it couldn’t possibly be that easy, and so I started over, and really messed it up.
Thanks for an interesting lesson, Jason.
P.S.: I am just experimenting with PPC for the first time and am making some interesting discoveries as to which headline pulls best there too. Very cool actually, since it’s almost instant gratification! Though at the moment the numbers are still kind of low and so it’s hard to tell for sure
Jason,
Good point about how things you think would perform better may not, unless you actually test it. People often forget that someone else’s frame of reference is different than their own. I’m kind of bummed about my performance. I guess it just goes to show that copywriting is both an art and a science. It has to be a perfect blend between the two. Too much of one and not enough of the other will lead you to have less than optimal copy.
Thanks for this info,
Jason
P.S. I figured I’d also pass this link along to you and everyone else who was interested in this. It’s not a self serving link or anything. I found this a while ago and it has helped me better understand copywriting headlines It’s at Jay Abraham’s site. He explains why some of the best performing headlines did so well:
http://www.abraham.com/articles/100_Greatest_Headlines_Ever_Written.html
This was fun (you built up curiosity very well
…. and instructive. Thanks for setting this up and elaborating on the points, and takeaways, Jason!
Warmly,
Dan
Very interesting! I’d love to spend more time with the answers – maybe in a few days. Thanks for the info Jason!
If only I’d “gone with my gut” and said the pull for 20’s A and B was identical I would’ve at least tied your results…
This was instructive, Jason. Thanks!