New Study Finds that Including Negative Terms in Headlines Drives More Clicks

According to a new study, which analyzed over 105k variations of story headlines. Stories with more negative terms in the headline drive more clicks, that those with positive terms which decreased engagement by users.

The study analyzed headline variations within posts, in order to get more insight into how changing the terminology of the headlines alone can impact click-through rates (CTR).

“Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased user intrest and positive words decreased the time spend within web content. For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate to 2.3%.”

The study used keyword analysis to detect negative terms in this headlines, with words like harm, troubling, heartbroken, ugly, and angry in the negative term.

The addition of these negative terms correlated with an increase in website clicks, while the use of positive terms - including benefit, laughed, pretty, favorite, and kind - had the opposite effect.

Which is not overly surprising. It doesn’t take a genius to see that divisive, argumentative takes generate more engagement, and with social platforms looking to incentivize more time spent in their apps, that engagement then tells their respective algorithms that this story is interesting, which then sees it distributed to more users, getting more reach and exposure.

With online sources increasingly becoming the news and entertainment providers. Using raw engagement data user interest has been a toxin that’s poisoned online discourse over time.

But algorithms of course, are not able to identify context – they’re binary systems that can only determine whether each post is generating likes, comments and shares. Various proposals have been put forward on how to better incentivize more positive online behaviors, but thus far under pressure from shareholders and the need to demonstrate growth no platform has been able to action such effectively.

Which means that content with argumentmentive and anger wins out.

“Negative information may be more ‘sticky’ in our brains people weigh negative information more heavily than positive information. This may be due to negative information automatically activating threat responses in the brain.

The bottom line finding is that a larger proportion of negative words in your headlines will increase the likelihood of users clicking through on your posts.

“A one standard deviation larger proportion of negative words increases the odds of a user clicking the headline by 1.5%. For example; for a headline of average length (14.965 words), this implies that for each negative word, the CTR increases by 2.3%. Compare this is to the coefficient for positive words is negative (???? = −0.008, SE = 0.001, z = −9.238, P < 0.001, 99% CI = (−0.010, −0.006)), implying that a larger proportion of positive words results in fewer clicks.”

It’s a bit sad to see what responses drives clicks. Many news organizations now seem to approach every news story with the worst possible take, in the hopes of sparking argument and discussion, which will inevitably get them more traffic.

In either case, for marketers or ecommerce sellers looking to get found in search, focusing on the negative in your posts could have a positive impact on improving your sites seo.