“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.”
David Ogilvy
When you notice an intriguing headline like “you’ll be shocked after reading this….” you want to click in order to read more, but mainly, it wasn’t worth it; just a big fuss about nothing. Such content or headline refers to so-called “clickbait”. It generates prompt reaction and higher CTRs (click-through rates). Though it may have a negative customer experience. Let’s have a closer look to understand what a clickbait is and review its pros and cons.
What is a Clickbait?
Clickbait is any type of content that is created to attract as many clicks as possible. As a clickbait content can be used any type of content – blog posts, stories, infographics or videos presented in a certain way. A typical clickbait should have the following characteristics:
- Attractive and interesting headline
- Notable and funny images/video
- Specific tone-of-voice evoking emotions
- Intended to social sharing
Although clickbait is a relatively recent phenomenon, the history of clickbait started over a century ago from yellow journalism.
Pros of Clickbait
So, if you are thinking about clickbait content, know how you could benefit. Let’s check out what advantages you can take from clickbaits.
Page views
Clickbait is the number one method for generating page views, whether you have a blog or website. If your goal to get more page views, then it is the best way. To evaluate the effectiveness of clickbait, you have to monitor the sources of your webpage traffic through Google Analytics.
Social Shares
An effective clickbait also might result in social sharing, though there is a case that people do not share the content that may effect the perceptions of their personality. And to encourage social sharing, it should evoke on people’s emotions. When the emotions are stronger, the chance of sharing is bigger. So, according to social media experts for social-friendly content, the following emotions are considered:
- Anger
- Happiness
- Surprise
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Fear
Evoke one of these emotions combined with an eye-catching headline, and you will generate a viral content.
Brand Awareness
Another advantage of clickbait is brand awareness. If clickbait results in social shares and page views, it will impact on your brand awareness. To boost brand awareness is one of the primary goal of content marketing and clickbait is the simplest way to help site audience remember your content thus your brand.
Cons of Clickbait
Although a good clickbait can be a helpful way for content marketers, it has some traps you should know.
Yellow journalism is outdated
When BuzzFeed launched in 2006, it very quickly became, because of its irresistible headlines. Now, everyone knows how to benefit using clickbaits to gain audience interest. The signal-to-noise ratio is so distorted now, that publishers are using desperate measures to be heard. Such a situation is simply unacceptable in the long run.
Confusing Clickbait Damages
When people click on a clickbait, they expect to get the content meeting their expectations. Otherwise, it may cause disappointment, which leads to mistrust. If you purposely fool them for getting page view, this may perceive your brand negatively.
Besides, from an analytics point of view, you might get useless numbers. Let’s say you are monetizing your website with advertising based on specific targeting, and you presented this demographic data to your clients. Because of short-lived visitors coming from clickbait, these critical data get muddled. You’ll have a poor average time spent on your page, and won’t be able to mine your data for important demographic info to present to advertisers.
Page views aren’t so important
Many content marketers create an average content under the attractive clickbait by hoping to increase the page view numbers. These efforts may be worthless, as some experts believe that page views aren’t so important. ‘
For example, Upworthy is drifting away from the page view model and focusing on a metric responsible for attention minutes by measuring two individual metrics:
- Total Attention on Site showing which topics are receiving the most interest across the site, like in case of page views.
- Total Attention per Piece which is calculated based on a combination of how many people view something on the site and how much of it they actually watch/read.
Conclusion
Coming up with sensationalist headlines that result in page views and social shares is always challenging to content marketers. However, there are pros and cons to using clickbait and only you can decide potential gains and risks.
