Long Copy Or Short Copy?

Here’s a reprint of an answer I gave a stu­dent in another forum who asked:

“Long copy? Or short copy?”

1. Long copy ver­sus short copy has been the sin­gle great­est debate since the begin­ning of the print­ing press. But long copy always out­per­forms short copy. Don’t be long for the sake of being long. Be long for the sake of pro­vid­ing as much infor­ma­tion as is needed to make the sale — and not one word more.

2. Peo­ple object to read­ing copy because: a) they are not tar­geted and b) the copy is bor­ing. “Length” is the excuse because it’s a com­mon cur­rency. “Bor­ing” is sub­jec­tive. “Long” is objec­tive. When copy starts to bore you, you nat­u­rally are inclined to say it’s “too long.” It’s too long because of the fact that it started to drag, caus­ing the reader to lose interest.

3. Speak­ing of tar­get­ing, this is cru­cial. The pre­vi­ous poster said, “I would read it if it’s some­thing I’m inter­ested in, like John’s Traf​fic​Se​crets​.com.” And that’s exactly the key. As Dan Kennedy said:

The per­son who says ‘I would never read all that copy’ makes the mis­take of think­ing they are the cus­tomer. And they’re not. We are never our own cus­tomers. There’s a thing in copy­writ­ing I teach called ‘message-​​to-​​market match’. It is this: when your mes­sage is matched to a tar­get mar­ket that has a high level of inter­est in it, not only does respon­sive­ness go up but read­er­ship goes up, too. The whole issue of inter­est goes up.


The truth about long copy is that, first of all, there’s abun­dant, legit­i­mate, sta­tis­ti­cal research, that’s split-​​testing research, to indi­cate that vir­tu­ally with­out excep­tion, long copy out­per­forms short copy. There’s some sig­nif­i­cant research has been done that indi­cate that read­er­ship falls off dra­mat­i­cally at 300 words but does not again drop off until 3,000 words.

As Dan says, what you can pull from that is this: peo­ple who dropped off at 300 words weren’t qual­i­fied for your offer in the first place. They wouldn’t have bought from you after 300 words much less after 50 or 5,000 words.

4. Recent web usabil­ity stud­ies show that peo­ple respond more favor­ably to more copy on less pages. Here’s an inter­est­ing study on long scrolling web pages by the folks at User Inter­face Engi­neer­ing. They found that peo­ple pre­fer longer scrolling copy over short, mul­ti­ple pages. I par­tic­u­larly like these 3 passages:

1. “Our research shows that fewer, longer pages may be the best approach for users. In the trade-​​off between hid­ing con­tent below the fold or spread­ing it across sev­eral pages, users have greater suc­cess when the con­tent is on a sin­gle page.”

2. “Increas­ing the lev­els of infor­ma­tion, sim­i­lar to adding sec­tions to an out­line, also seemed to help users.”

3. “Users may tell us they hate scrolling, but their actions show some­thing else. Most users read­ily scrolled through pages, usu­ally with­out comment.”

Read the results of the study here.

5. Plus, here’s my rea­son­ing behind long copy sales pages over mul­ti­ple, smaller pages. For a sin­gle product-​​focused “mini-​​site,” this process is proven to have the best results in split-​​tests. Click­ing to another page causes what psy­chol­o­gists call “cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance.” (Also known as “buyer’s remorse” or hav­ing “2nd thoughts.”)

The idea is that, by click­ing to another page while one is engaged in the read­ing process of sales copy forces read­ers to think twice, as it causes a brief, men­tal dis­sas­so­ci­a­tion or dis­trac­tion, which inter­rupts the flow, momen­tum and inten­sity of the sales pitch.

6. And best of all, recent tests con­ducted by Mar​keting​Ex​per​i​ments​.com prove, with­out a doubt, that long copy out­per­forms short copy. Reprinted:

In the first test, we sent traf­fic to two land­ing pages using Google AdWords. The first page was the home page, which con­tained short copy describ­ing the prod­uct. The sec­ond page was sim­i­lar, but fea­tured a much longer arti­cle about the prod­uct. Both pages prompted vis­i­tors to click through to the order page, from which point they would be taken to the shop­ping cart.

Our ini­tial results were gath­ered after a five-​​day period:

Test 1 — Short Copy ——————————- Clicks = 810 Cost = $94.29 CPC = $0.10 Rev­enue = $271.75 ROI = –14% Con­ver­sion = 0.37% ——————————-

Test 1 — Long Copy ——————————- Clicks = 1,163 Cost = $135.61 CPC = $0.10 Rev­enue = $547.50 ROI = +21% Con­ver­sion = 0.52% ——————————-

In our ini­tial micro-​​test, long copy out­per­formed short copy by 40.54%. Click-​​through traf­fic sent to the short copy page was unprof­itable (-14% ROI), while traf­fic sent to the long copy page pro­duced an ROI of 21%.

In this first micro-​​test, it appears that the long copy page per­formed much bet­ter than the short copy page. How­ever, a five-​​day period is not enough to account for sta­tis­ti­cal fluc­tu­a­tions that may skew our real results. So we con­tin­ued to test.

We main­tained the same test, expanded our key­word bid­ding slightly, and gath­ered addi­tional results over the sub­se­quent five days:

Test 2 — Short Copy ——————————- Clicks = 1,700 Cost = $258.62 CPC = $0.15 Rev­enue = $295.75 ROI = –66% Con­ver­sion = 0.18% ——————————-

Test 2 — Long Copy ——————————- Clicks = 1,440 Cost = $218.83 CPC = $0.15 Rev­enue = $1,094.15 ROI = +50% Con­ver­sion = 0.69% ——————————-

Again, long copy out­per­formed short copy, this time by an even greater fac­tor of nearly four to one. Our ROI was a dis­mal –66% for the short copy page and a very respectable 50% for the long copy page.

And…

In gen­eral, long copy offers the fol­low­ing advantages:

1. Your vis­i­tors will have most of their ques­tions answered and will have less anx­i­ety about order­ing from you.

2. Long copy can reduce cus­tomer ser­vice by qual­i­fy­ing your cus­tomers to a greater degree.

3. Long copy with bolded or empha­sized points can allow some of your vis­i­tors to skim, while oth­ers more inter­ested in specifics can find all the infor­ma­tion they want. In this sense, long copy gives vis­i­tors more options.

4. Long (and inter­est­ing) keyword-​​rich copy often per­forms well in nat­ural search engines.

Even more…

The long vs. short debate often over­looks the most impor­tant fac­tor when it comes to web­site copy: qual­ity. High-​​quality short copy will out­per­form poorly writ­ten long copy every time. The best pos­si­ble copy should be devel­oped and tested before you even begin to worry about the long vs. short debate.

Uti­lize an A-​​B split test. This will ensure that other fac­tors (such as time, traf­fic source, and so on) do not skew your results.

Here are a few soft­ware solu­tions that will enable you to run A-​​B split tests:

- http://​www​.splittest​gen​er​a​tor​.com/

– http://​splithit​.com/
–
http://​prof​it​info​.com/​c​a​t​a​l​o​g​/​v4/

And finally…

Copy should be long enough to do its job effec­tively, and not a word longer. Long copy for the sake of long copy is not to your ben­e­fit. Always keep in mind the pri­mary goal of your website’s copy (to sell your prod­uct or ser­vice, to solicit sub­scrip­tions, etc.).

Uti­lize bul­lets and/​or num­bered lists where appro­pri­ate. These make it eas­ier for vis­i­tors to digest your infor­ma­tion and pre­vent your pages from becom­ing one long block of gray.

Uti­lize tes­ti­mo­ni­als. Praise from your sat­is­fied cus­tomers is much more effec­tive than self-​​praise.

While our ini­tial Long Copy vs. Short Copy micro-​​tests returned results clearly in favor of long copy, true opti­miza­tion of your own website’s copy will only come through your own test­ing. How­ever, the guide­lines above should give you a good place to start. We will con­tinue to revise our own test­ing and share our results.

Read the issue here, with spe­cific results:
http://​mar​keting​ex​per​i​ments​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​l​o​n​g​_​v​s​_​s​h​o​r​t​.​cfm

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

Other Related Posts

• The Gold is In The Picks And Shovels
• There's More to Tracking than Conversion
• The 5 Elements of Defense-Piercing Multimedia
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Website Copy
• Risk-Reversal's Role Reversal