Thrive Headline Optimizer Review: How to Come Up With The Perfect Headline

You only have 2.6 seconds to win over a new visitor. To make matters worse, over 2 million blog posts are published each day.

How can you possibly separate yourself from the competition and get your blog post to stand out from the crowd?

Your headline is your best shot.

Normally, you try and brainstorm a great headline for your blog post and that’s the last you think of it.

But how do you really know if you really picked the best possible headline that will attract the most visitors to your post?

You really can’t.

Unless, you are using the new Thrive Headline Optimizer plugin from Thrive Themes which we’re going to review today.

What is Thrive Headline Optimizer?

Advertising guru David Ogilvy said 5 times as many people read your headline over your body copy. Which makes sense, especially in today’s world where you normally scan headlines in an email or in search results prior to clicking through and reading the entire content.

The trouble is figuring out which headline will work – ahead of time – is nearly impossible. You can trust your gut, but otherwise there’s now way to be sure which will work best.

Thrive Headline Optimizer solves this problem.

Instead of allowing your posts to slip through the cracks with ineffective headlines that fail to grab attention, it will test different variations based on the 3 crucial engagement factors.

Thrive Headline Optimizer is a Wordpress plugin that will test headline variations based on those engagement factors, pick the option with the best statistics based on real user data, and then automagically show it to the rest of your post visitors to increase future post views and engagement.

Why those factors, instead of total visits or page views? Optimizing posts for view-based metrics might make your traffic numbers look good, but can often be skewed by external factors out of your control.

For example, maybe a big influencer just promoted your new blog post which got you an influx of visitors.

Did you get more traffic because of your headline? Probably not.

Instead, optimizing headlines around engagement based factors will make sure that you are measuring your most valued readers. These are the visitors who will sign up for your email list and purchase your latest products.

Sounds great, right?

But how does it work?

How Thrive Headline Optimizer Works

One of the best aspects about the Thrive Headline Optimizer is ease of use. When you fire up a new blog post draft in WordPress, you’ll see a little text link by the headline area to add more options.

Simply click that text link, add a headline, and continue until your satisfied.

You can also go to the Thrive Headline Optimizer dashboard, where you can pick from your existing posts and pages and choose to create a new headline test for them.

This process takes just take a few seconds, and the plugin will take care of the A/B testing for your titles on its own, showing new site visitors different headlines until a winner can be chosen confidently (based on statistical significance).

After entering headline variations, it’s time to select the Test Criteria for that piece of content. Here you’re given options for selecting how you’d like winning headline variations to be chosen, and if you’d like a winner selected automatically (or if you’d prefer to do it manually).

You can also select the specific winning criteria for minimum engagements, duration, and confidence level.

Your results will begin showing up on the dashboard once you’ve started the test, summarizing the Views, Engagements, and the Engagement Rate for that day.

You can also get detailed views on specific tests running (for individual pieces of content), or dive into the reporting features for more granularity.

If the default settings aren’t working for your particular setup, or if you’d simply like see how they’re calculated, you can navigate over to the Settings option. Here you’ll be able to toggle specific options On or Off (depending if you’d like to prefer one metric over the other).

You can also adjust the percentage for page scrolling, or seconds for time on site to suit your own blog’s particular audience.

For example, low Time on Content for commercial sites might be a good thing! It means people are taking action. Whereas on a blog post, the higher the Time on Content you have the better.

Final Thoughts

If you have used Thrive Leads before, you can see that Shane and his team have taken the same basic ideas of what made their A/B split testing feature so great, and applied it to headline testing.

What I like most about Thrive Headline Optimizer is how seamless it is. Once installed, you really have no excuse not to use it. And the potential gains from optimizing your headlines can really make a big difference.

If you are currently a Thrive Themes member, then you will get Thrive Headline Optimizer free with your membership.

With Thrive Leads, Thrive Content Builder, and now Thrive Headline Optimizer, getting in on the membership is really compelling. The Thrive Team is famous for adding new features to their products, so the value you get from joining keeps getting better and better.

If you don’t want the membership though, then you can still purchase Thrive Headline Optimizer separately for $67 to use on unlimited sites.

Try Thrive Headline Optimizer Today