The Language That Drives Engagement: A Systematic Large-scale Analysis of Headline Experiments

We use a large-scale data set of thousands of field experiments conducted on Upworthy.com, an online media platform, to investigate the cognitive, motivational, affective, and grammatical factors implementable in messages that increase engagement with online content. We map from textual cues measured with text-analysis tools to constructs implied to be relevant by a broad range of prior research literatures. We validate the constructs with human judgment and then test which constructs causally impact click-through to articles when implemented in headlines. Our findings suggest that the use of textual cues identified in previous research and industry advice does impact the effectiveness of headlines overall, but the prior research and industry advice does not always provide useful guidance as to the direction of the effects. We identify which textual characteristics make headlines most effective at motivating engagement in our online news setting.

History: K. Sudhir served as the senior editor.

Funding: Funding was provided by the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2021.0018.