“Click Here” - Hyperlink Text That Works
Marketing Sherpa has recently published a study which resulted in some intriguing results. The key objective of the research was to see whether putting an instruction like “click here” in your link text would make the link more effective—would more people click on it?
You may feel a little uneasy about adding the instruction “click here” to your links—after all, the visitors to your site aren’t complete Internet novices are they? Most people can tell the difference between normal text and links, and so there may be a perception that putting something like “click here” on the link is a little patronizing. Surprisingly however, it works a treat!
Marketing Sherpa have used a newsletter as a testing ground. At the end of article summaries they placed the usual hyperlink to link back to the full article. They varied the text for this hyperlink to see if it would make a difference on the number of people clicking on them. The resulting click-through rate was as follows:
“Read more” - 1.8%
“Continue to article” - 3.3%
“Click to continue” - 8.53%
Look at that! When the instruction to “click” was added to the anchor text, the click-through rate went up to 8.53%, a very healthy boost. It appears that visitors like to be told what to do—even if they realize that that bit of underlined text is a link, they still need a call to action to push them to click on it. I think results like these cannot be ignored. If you own a site, you should check to see whether your link text could be optimized—adding a simple call to action words like “click here” or “click to continue” may result in a significant boost for your conversion rates.
Comment by Myles de Bastion — Oct 5, 2007 @ 11:41 am
An interesting and useful study, I always wondered how I should address my links. It’s nice that this confirms the method that I preferred to employ.
Visitors to the site can note that our blog uses the (click to continue) method on the main page with a (click to read more) . Preach what you teach n’ all.
(bet you just tried to click that!)
Comment by Dave Hawkins — Oct 7, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
It depends on the context, I think. ‘Call to action’ words are helpful on links that you want people to click on after making a decision (”I want to read the full article” or “I want a ticket to this event”). However, I think that hyperlinks used as asides in ordinary text should be left as simply the description:
“Using _Kontakt_ to produce this music resulted in an interesting workflow”
Adding “_Click here for more information about Kontact_” by itself would interrupt the flow, unless it was added at the end because it was the main point of the article. I always cringe when I see ‘call to action’ words used by themselves regardless of context:
“for pics of my holiday _click_here_”
Yuck.
However, if I will consider using call to action words in future for links that people might click on as a result of reading the article. For example
“_Click here to buy tickets to this event_”
or
“_Click here to log in to web application_”
I’ll have to think about this, because I’m not sure exactly how I decide whether call to action words are appropriate.
Comment by Dmitry Fadeev — Oct 7, 2007 @ 4:33 pm
Hey Dave, nice to see you posting here :)
I think you’re right. Many people these days tend to place helpful links right into the body of the text—similarly to links sprinkled round Wikipedia articles. Adding call to actions here is would just be adding noise.
For more focused navigation purposes, adding call to actions seems to work—especially very specific ones like “click here”, telling the user exactly what to do. People are constantly looking for things to click as they read through pages. Many people are very frantic and view each page only for a few seconds—they just want to go somewhere like they’re on fire. When you add the call to action, it helps those people make a decision subconsciously and they will be more enticed to click the link. This is what I think at least, I’m by no means an expert in this, but I think the results of the study are quite interesting and could have potential conversion boosts.
Comment by Speech Girl — Oct 26, 2007 @ 3:00 am
Hey thanks for this post … will definitely try it on our site.
S G.
Comment by Idetrorce — Dec 15, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Comment by Five Minute Argument — Feb 24, 2009 @ 7:24 am
“Many people these days tend to place helpful links right into the body of the text” - that is not exactly a new practice - the web began like that. When you’re familiar with *really good* in-copy linking, it becomes obvious that it’s just as useful (if not more so, in some contexts) as navigation linking. It just belongs to a slightly different model.
“Many people are very frantic and view each page only for a few seconds—they just want to go somewhere like they’re on fire.” - I believe this is more an argument to ensure your links stand out from a graphical design perspective, rather than changing their editorial content.
I’d be loathe to ever have “click here” as the text label for a link, no matter what research happens to ‘prove’., *especially* when that research is commissioned by a marketing company with one of the worst designed websites I’ve seen in a long time.
Comment by Herr Voß — Feb 25, 2009 @ 3:54 am
I can only read the summary of the original study, but the title suggests that the result is only valid in E-Mail marketing. And I think links in E-Mails are totally different from links on web pages.
Comment by Banago — Feb 27, 2009 @ 6:50 am
Very interesting conclusion. I also think this result would work in websites as well as email newsletters. Let’s try it :)