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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

The first item, long single page designs, has always been a favorite of skilled marketers. It goes back even to pre-web snailmail marketing.

In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. You keep offering more and more reasons to buy, and you keep converting more and more readers.

This relates to one of the basic observations about selling: people don't like to change their minds. They won't spontaneously go from "no" to "yes". But if you offer a new piece of information, they can change their mind without admitting they were "wrong" before. Every new piece of information, or new story, is another opportunity for them to get to "yes".

Obviously, the copy also needs to be good.

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Seriously -- I am dying to get some kind of good, nuanced study on this.

On the one side, defending long-form copy ads are David Ogilvy (probably popularly considered to be the greatest advertising genius ever, and who rigorously statistically tested all his methods), and today, companies like Apple.

On the other side, are lots of Web 2.0 A/B testing results that basically say, shorter is better.

Now, I'm sure there are times when each are right. But I've never heard anyone explain when long-form is better vs when short-form is better, and when each performs worse.

Is it high-end products (long copy) vs low-end products (short copy)? Is it "experience" products vs "utility" products? Is it left-brain vs right-brain consumers? Is it impulse buys vs researched buys? I could invent a million ideas, but I want proof, not hypotheses.

I am positively desperate for some kind of researched and statistically backed-up explanation that figures out the factors on both sides!

I am positively desperate for some kind of researched and statistically backed-up explanation that figures out the factors on both sides!

Why don't you learn to write copy and test it yourself? You will arrive to the same conclusion that every industry veteran arrives to: long copy out sells short copy. Why? Everyone has different hypothesis. Mine is that long copy allows for the writer to disqualify prospects and attack all buying objections right from the start. When you have those two things working for you, the decision to buy mostly boils down to how attractive the product is to the prospect. Try it out. Learn it. I'll even teach you the basic if you want. If you can program, this stuff is cake. email in profile.

I'd speculate that it's generally easier for people to not decide and conserve their willpower, but we still gravitate towards ‘decision mode’ when about to do something that looks irreversible. Two common cases:

a) Easily reversible or just insignificant action, no commitment—you offer a free product or trial, or a paid service that could be easily cancelled. Long copy would turn on ‘decision mode’, but we may want to avoid that, so less info is probably better.

Example: Lots of ‘Web 2.0’ services.

b) Not easily reversible action—money are required up front, or you're upselling something to free users. Regular people (not yet fans of your product) are likely to consider different options in this case. Long and good copy, therefore, would present more and more reasons to pay.

Example: Apple website.

That said, I'd like to see a study too.

They don't release their exact statistics, but Conversion Rate Experts are pretty authoritative on the subject of scrolling vs. fold.

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/scrolling-tips/

  In split tests, long pages often beat shorter pages.

  As a rule of thumb, your page should contain at least as 
  many words as you’d use when selling your product or
  service face to face.  

  The winning page we designed for SEOmoz was six times 
  longer than the control, which it outperformed by 52%.

  Whenever someone tells you that they’d never buy from a 
  long page, remind them how long Amazon’s pages are.

  Long pages are effective, but only if your users know that
  they can scroll and are given compelling reasons to do so.

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/

  The redesigned page is about 20 times as long as the
  control... new page outperformed the control by 30%.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conver...

  In our initial micro-test, long copy outperformed short 
  copy by 40.54%. Click-through traffic sent to the short
  copy page was unprofitable (-14% ROI), while traffic sent
  to the long copy page produced an ROI of 21%.

http://conversionxl.com/4-cases-where-short-home-pages-outpe...

  Short copy performs better when there is low perceived
  risk, low cost, and low commitment... when the customer 
  has an emotional, impulsive, and “want-oriented” 
  motivation. When you want people to take action that 
  doesn’t cost them dollars (email signups, free trial,
  clickthrough)

http://blog.clicktale.com/2007/10/05/clicktale-scrolling-res...

  Visitors are equally likely to scan the entire page no
  matter the page size.

  Below 540 pixels, both visitor attention and page exposure
  decline exponentially.

On the other side, are lots of Web 2.0 A/B testing results that basically say, shorter is better.

I might have missed that one. Could you provide a representative link or three?

> In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins.

Really? I'd love to see A/B results somewhere of this, as it doesn't agree with my experience. Maybe it depends on industry. Or, maybe sufficiently good copy beats out shorter designs, but most people just can't generate that kind of copy. (Though it sounds like we're getting to a New True Scotsman a bit.)

When my start-up did an A/B test of our homepage, we found less content won out. Also 37 signals did their series on optimization, and had strong results[1] that shorter beat out long form, too.

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...

With a freemium product, I think the short vs long copy really depends. For my product, the average time between first visit and a sale is 5 months. Unless you run the tests for a year, it is difficult to determine which version effects the most revenue/profits.

My rule of thumb is that if you have a very solid on-boarding process, then short copy and a giant signup button will likely work well (Dropbox, 37Signals, etc). They transition the prospective customer from mildly interested to an active user via the app itself.

If it is not, then longer copy on the homepage to prime the customer for why they need your product makes more sense.

When A/B testing, it is important that you are optimizing for active users, not just trying to maximize the number of rows in the user tables. When I run A/B tests, the units are dollars, not percent. It means the tests have to be run for a really long time, but it is common that what is best for revenue, is not always what creates the most button clicks, or the most rows in a database table.

"According to Bob, short copy performs better when there is low perceived risk, low cost, and low commitment. Also, when the customer has an emotional, impulsive, and “want-oriented” motivation. In other words, if you’re looking to write high-impact copy for concert tickets, designer shoes, or mp3 players…keep it short. Bob states that long copy is the better performer when there is a rational, analytical, need-oriented motivation. Think consumer insurance products or many complex B2B offerings."

http://conversionxl.com/4-cases-where-short-home-pages-outpe...

I notice this too, but it seems to fly in the face of a lot of people who say "make the page short , people don't want to read".

Case in point a lot of startup websites that have one sentence of huge text saying "X let's you do Y with Z" and then a gigantic "SIGN UP" button and nothing else on the page.

There's also a lot of pages that seem to do a halfway house and provide a lot of images for re-enforcement. Like this one: http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-mini/overview/

> Obviously, the copy also needs to be good.

For varying values of 'good'. I think I remember Eben Pagan (aka "David DeAngelo") saying that he split-tested copy with some mistakes and sloppy writing vs copy that was more polished, and got more conversions from the sloppy version. Maybe it gave readers less of a 'slick marketing' vibe?

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