The Marketing Experiments Journal discusses how testing web page headlines will yield surprising results and help you generate sales.

It doesn't matter how experienced you are, or how good a writer you are, headline testing will always surprise you when you see the results.

In addition, headlines have a significant impact on the performance of the entire page.

How do you test headlines? You can perform a series of simple A/B or A/B/C split tests, or you can use multivariate testing.

In a recent and ongoing quest to increase conversion rates for an existing web page, we conducted a multivariate test with six alternative headlines.

These headlines were all written for a single page which offers parents of young children the opportunity to find out if there are any registered sex offenders living in their neighborhood.

"There are More Than 491,720 Registered Sex Offenders in the U.S..." 

1. "Does a sexual offender live in your neighborhood?"
2. "Identify Sex Offenders Today-- Be Aware, Be Alert & Be Safe"
3. "Protect Your Children, Identify Sexual Offenders in Your Area" 
4. "Identify Registered Sex Offenders Living Near You"
5. "Search the National Sex Offender Database"

Here are the results:

The fifth headline ("Identify Registered Sex Offenders Living Near You") converted 34 percent better than the next best headline. That 34 percent increase in conversion rates is a very significant number, particularly if you have high visitor volumes, high-ticket items to sell or strong repeat business. In other words, this kind of improvement can have a major impact on revenue figures.

Without taking the time to test, you will simply never know whether your current page could do significantly better with a different headline.

You'll find a full archive of our test results, and analysis within the MarketingExperiments.com Research Archives.

The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.