Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Are you more likely to click here?
or over here?
At the top of this article or down below, at the bottom?
We don’t want your finger to cramp so here’s the gist: News site visitors are more likely to make those recirculating taps when stories are grouped in a simply titled Related Stories module rather than a more tongue-twisting section (though we’re still partial to What We’re Reading), when at the bottom of the article (yay for reading finishers, or at least scroll-happy visitors), and when accompanied by images.
“Among those who first visited the site during the study period, 1.42 percent clicked on a link,” researchers Talia Stroud and Jessica Collier wrote. “Although this appears to be a low rate of engagement, content distribution sites like Outbrain suggest that healthy clickthrough rates are between 0.10 and 0.25 percent. The results of our study show that links can be designed to generate higher clickthrough rates. In fact, in nearly all instances, it didn’t matter which device was used, the specific news site visited, or even the referral page.”
The deets:
- Link layouts containing images generated 63 percent more clicks than those that consisted of only text
- Links at the end of a page generated 55 percent more clicks than links in the middle of a page
- Overall, using related content instead of popular content led to a 14 percent increase in clicks
- Popular content, however, generated more clicks when the referral page was Facebook
- Generic wording (e.g. Related Stories) generated slightly more clicks than more complex
wording (e.g. What Else People Can Read on This Topic)- It didn’t matter whether people used a smartphone, phablet, tablet, or desktop. It didn’t matter which site users visited. It didn’t matter which page referred them to the site. In all of these instances, there were more clicks when links (1) appeared at the end of articles, and (2) contained images.
The full report is available here.
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