As part of my ongoing Rainmaker Marketing Challenge and initiative to rid myself of the many marketing tools I’ve been using – I’ve been wanting to test the accuracy of the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. I’ve used it numerous times when crafting headlines for my blog posts, call to actions, headlines for landing pages, Hello Bars and email opt-ins, but often had a nagging thought:
Does the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer provide any meaningful value? Or is it a waste of your precious time as a busy blogger / online marketer? Can it help you craft effective, catchy headlines/titles and call to actions?
The Advanced Marketing Institute also have a headline analyzer which I’ve added, tested and compared to the one from CoSchedule.
Can any of these two headline analyzers predict the success rate (aka: click-through rate) of my Hello Bars? Can they predict which of your headlines will work best for your audience?
In this video, I test whether there’s any correlation between my Hello Bar click-through rates, and the headline analyzer scores from CoSchedule and Advanced Marketing Institute.
Note: I’m fully aware the data in my speadsheet are not as statistically significant as we could wish for, so please bear with me. This was a quick test to get an idea of the usefulness (or uselessness) of headline analyzers. I welcome your comments on this and if you can do a larger study based on more data: please go for it – and let me know:)
A quick, additional bonus experiment
For what it’s worth:
I “optimized” the title for this very blog post, using the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer which gave it a quite healthy score of 75.
Conversely, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Advanced Marketing Institute’s headline analyzer gave it a whopping score of… 0.00% … These two headline tools just won’t agree on what makes a good headline, it seems.
Rewriting the title to “Can the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer help you write catchy headlines?” yields a somewhat better AMI score of 20.00% – but a worse CoSchedule score of 55 – only adding to the confusion. They still disagree, but have switched their positions 180 degrees.
As the saying goes: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” eh? What CoSchedule deems a good headline; the Advanced Marketing Institute frowns upon. And vice versa. Makes no sense.
And Advanced Marketing Institute even believes it’s a headline with spiritual (huh?) content:
I rest my case then;o)
I can’t see any benefit in using the Advanced Marketing Institute and CoSchedule headline analyzers when neither of them can predict a good headline. It’s like that infamous study, where they had a monkey trade stocks and concluded that the monkey’s trades were as good as following the advice of the “expert” stock market analysts.
It doesn’t make sense to waste our time using the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, optimizing a headline from a 60-ish score to a 70+ headline score, if there’s no correlation to real-life results.
As an added bonus: ditching these headline analyzers will save you from that ambivalent feeling that can arise when CoSchedule says headline A is better (scored higher) than headline B – when your gut/intuition tells you the exact opposite.
I’d say trust your gut.
PS: Subscribe to the fresh new WebMatros YouTube channel!
How about you? Do you like using these headline analyzers? Do you feel you benefit from them? I’m eager to know! Reply in the comments section below!
T. A. Somers says
I can definitely say that for a blogger whose skills have lapsed, both the CoSchedule and Advanced Marketing Institute headline analyzers have churned out some forehead-slapping reminders when my titles were needlessly weak.
As long as they aren’t used religiously or as a crutch, I believe both tools can remind beginning-to-mid-level bloggers and content marketers to turn up the emotional appeal on their headings, subheadings, tweetables and email subject lines.
For seasoned professionals, these tools may be little more than an annoyance and a distraction.
Robert Donnell says
Thanks for confirming my suspicions. We have used both, only to wonder why the differences were so startling! Never saw good results from either.
Maybe next year.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hey Robert
Good to hear from you:)
Yup, you’re right: maybe next year =)
It’s an interesting field to follow. Tech is getting better every day, so who knows: maybe next year;o)
Oliver