13 more before-after examples of engaging headlines
As the response was fairly positive to my original Medium post on headline engagement and best practices, I wanted to share a few more examples before I moved on to other topics.
After the first piece, I received a lot of nice comments, the great folks at MediaShift republished the piece and I even got a chance to ramble on about headlines to the awesome staff at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. As an aside, I now have a pretty slick Google Slides version of my thoughts on this topic!
But as I continued to talk about headlines, I kept finding new and better case studies. So what follows really is more of an addendum to the first post, a final notebook dump of sorts, where we at the Chicago Tribune took digitally deficient headlines and really focused on drawing out the compelling aspects.
As before, in all of these examples, we at least doubled realtime homepage engagement (click-through rate) after we made the change. We based this on Chartbeat’s heads-up display. So if 50 people were clicking on a headline before, at least 100 were after. Visually, that looks like this …
But this is only one measuring stick. More compelling heds are more sharable on social as well.
Why the before-after format? While every story’s unique, I think there’s more to be learned from studying empirically successful headlines than in just reading tips and theories. Plus, as I said, I already wrote that. So, I hope there’s a little added value in these 13 new examples.
Before:
This one is particularly galling in that that headline is vague, a pun and also dead wrong, as the story specifically says they’re NOT falling down.
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After, part 1:
After, part 2:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
Before:
Before:
After:
More H/T’s to my great Tribune team, including Jeff Cercone, Kyle Betts and Aly Brumback and Alex Parker.