Your headline is the ad for your ad (or your webpage, article, email, etc). It’s what gets your stuff read.

So, how long should your headline be to get your stuff read AND persuade more folks to buy?

I was recently directed (via Ryan Healy’s blog) to check out a study by James Brausch on headline length.

Here’s what James had to say:

The average sales page has a headline of only 10 words comprising 55 characters. The profitable sales pages had and average of 14 words and 82 characters in their headlines.

We can conclude that profitable sales pages use longer headlines than the average sales page.

Considering that a winning headline connects with the reader on a number of different levels, this isn’t so surprising.

James went on to conclude…

With only a handful of exceptions in thousands of data points, a length longer than 150 characters was very rare. Can we conclude that extremely long headlines aren’t profitable? No; there are other possibilities. However, we can conclude that it is exceptionally rare for profitable sales pages to use headlines longer than 150 characters. In fact, 90% of the data points fell within 131 characters.

While I’d love to know more of the specifics of how the study was conducted, I’ll agree with James’s findings… sort of.

While short headlines rarely have the ability to generate the desire and interest to read your content, long headlines chave a tendency to be overbearing to the eye and actually turn readers away.

It’s the rich headlines that communicate a promise of benefit, create irresistible curiosity, or emotionally align with the reader that win the most readers and impact sales. While this mostly needs a longer headline to do, it doesn’t always require it.

That being said, take a look at this headline I came across (357 characters)… too long?