Update: We have updated the title length recommendations.
Webinar titles are one of the most important factors to be considered when trying to acquire registrants for your webinar. They’re the most visible component of the webinar promotion and marketing campaign — they’re front-and-centre in press releases, webinar invitations, social posts, website listings and more. More importantly, the webinar title is the first thing visitors see when they visit your webinar event and registration page.
Webinar abstracts are the content you’ll see on a webinar registration page that explains what the speakers of the webinar will discuss and what webinar registrants will learn from a webinar. They’re the piece of content that helps registration page viewers decide whether or not the webinar is worth their time, and as a webinar marketer, they’re the last chance you have at solidifying a webinar registration.
We’ve seen suggestions from various blog posts around the internet about the optimal title length and abstract length for a webinar but didn’t find any hard data to back those suggestions. So, we set our hard-working interns to task to definitively determine if there is a relationship between the length of a webinar title and the length of a webinar abstract, and the webinar’s registration rate. If there was a relationship between the two, our interns were tasked with finding the optimal webinar title length and the optimal webinar abstract length. The answer was a little more complex than we imagined.
Keep in mind that this analysis was done with data only from Xtalks.com and we have some unique functionalities that you may not find elsewhere on the web. Nevertheless, we think the results of this analysis apply wherever you’re choosing to run your webinars.
Webinar Analysis Methods:
To get the analysis started, our interns compiled more than 100 randomly selected webinars along with each webinar’s Google Analytics data. Interns chose to compile statistics only for live webinar registrations rather than both live and recorded webinar registrations. This meant defining the duration of analysis from the day the webinar was posted until the day of the live webinar. The number of words per title and number of characters per title were added up for all 100 webinars. The same was done for each webinar abstract — no small tasks for our interns!
They also disregarded outlier data and webinars with too few data points to give us reliable statistics. They organized the word count of titles, from webinars with as few as seven words per title and as many as seventeen words per title (Figure 1). The character count of webinar titles (Figure 2) were grouped into ranges, as were the word counts of webinar abstracts (Figure 3), and the character count of webinar abstracts (Figure 4).After each webinar was appropriately grouped into these ranges, we looked at the conversion rate of each webinar and obtained an average.
We define webinar conversion rate as follows:
Webinar Conversion Rate = # of webinar registrations / # webinar registration pageviews
The webinar conversion rates are confidential information, so unless you’re a client of ours, we’re not going to disclose our conversion rates in this blog post. Fortunately, you won’t need that to benefit from this post, so read on!
Webinar Conversion Rate Analysis:
Word Count:
Analyzing the word count of both titles and abstracts revealed data that didn’t necessarily show a clear answer to the question of an optimal title length but gave some hints to a predictor of optimal abstract length.
Figure 5: Webinar Title Word Count vs Conversion Rate
Looking at the word count per title (Figure 5) showed a poor correlation between conversion rate and the number of words in the webinar title. From these data it looked like there was no correlation at all.
Figure 6: Webinar Abstract Word Count vs Conversion Rate
Reviewing this graph (Figure 6) of abstract length vs conversion rate reveals that shorter abstracts tend to yield higher conversion rates. There appears to be a clear trend showing that as abstract length increases, conversion rate falls.
Character Count:
Analyzing the character count of both titles and abstracts revealed data that was more telling of the relationship between title and abstract length and webinar conversion rates.
Figure 7: Webinar Title Character Count vs Conversion Rate
Reviewing the data from the character count of webinar titles didn’t give us a clear answer to how they affect conversion rate (Figure 7), albeit, we do see a slight decrease in conversion rate as character count increases. That said, the trendline doesn’t clearly fit the data, so we can’t clearly determine that this relationship is true.
Figure 8: Webinar Abstract Character Count vs Conversion Rate
Looking at the character counts (Figure 8) from webinar abstracts confirmed the trend we observed from Figure 5. It appears that as webinar abstracts get longer, the conversion rate decreases.
Determining Optimal Title Length and Abstract Length:
Since character and word counts for title length gave us inconclusive data, we would hesitate to say that webinar title length has a direct effect on webinar conversion rates. That said, we recommend that webinar titles should be on the shorter side — under 70-71 characters long so that when appearing in Google search results, the full title tag is displayed and not truncated. This may ultimately get more views of your webinar event page.
Abstract length, whether it was measured using the number of words or characters, revealed that shorter abstracts yielded higher webinar conversion rates. Finding the optimal abstract length however is not so straight forward — the problem being if word count is too low on a webinar event page, it is possible it may not optimally appear in Google search results.
Although content length is a highly contested SEO variable, we wouldn’t rule out the possibility that extremely small abstracts may not perform as well in Google search as longer form abstracts. Moreover, webinar abstracts need to be long enough to convey enough information to the reader so that a reader will understand the educational value of your webinar.
Taken together, we recommend a balance between conversions and potential search visibility: Webinar abstracts should aim to be around 300 words in length to obtain an optimal webinar conversion rate and visibility in search.
It is important to note that webinar content is the ultimate conversion rate optimizing variable. So before you agonize on finding the optimal title and abstract length, be sure to ask yourself some other, more important questions: Who is your audience and how will they respond to your content? How helpful and worthwhile will the webinar be to its attendees? Are you planning to educate and inform your audience? After you’ve thoroughly discussed these issues, be sure to review our other blog posts that discuss optimizing titles and abstracts such as, A/B Testing webinars and optimizing other components of your webinar event page.
We have many more tips and tricks for you in our webinar production and marketing tips blog, but we apply them all (and more) to the events we run for our webinar clients. If you’re interested in hosting your own webinar, be sure to contact us.
TL:DR
I don’t blame you. You just want to know what you need to run a webinar right?
- Webinar titles should aim to be under 70-71 characters long.
- Webinar abstracts should aim to be around 300 words in length.
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