Last week I posted an article titled “Sexy Sells – I Have the Stats to Prove It“. In that article I discussed the use of the word “Sexy” in the name of a jQuery Plugin, which looking at the stats, appeared to get a distinct number of click throughs compared to the others on the page. I argued that despite the dull looking screenshot, the inclusion of “Sexy” in the name grabbed a lot of attention from visitors.

Arguments against this were many. Some stated that perhaps because the screenshot I posted didn’t really show the “features” of that plugin, more people were intrigued in clicking through to see what it is all about. Others said I was just downright wrong – fair enough. Hopefully this article will sway the non-believers.

Blog Stats

Without going into too much of the detail on exact numbers, on a daily basis my blog gets well into the thousands of visits/pageviews. I’ve had what I would have called many successful articles whereby I’ve seen a significant spike in traffic, well received on social news sites, as well as some exceptional retweeting on Twitter.

That was, until I posted the “Sexy Sells” article. Every social media site that this article was featured on went nuts (bar Digg). I have never seen anything like it. In the first 6 hours, I had a steady 200 concurrent users at any given time which previously I had reached a lofty 75 before.

This time though, I wasn’t posting screenshots, I was doing exactly as the article suggest – including the word “Sexy” in the title. This is what happened:

Here you can clearly see the day I posted the article, and the following day. I received something like 400% over my most busiest day before that on my blog. How did I do it? I included the word “Sexy” in the title, and sparked a pretty keen debate.

This clearly shows that in fact it has pretty much nothing to do with the content that the word “Sexy” relates to. People will pretty much click it anyway. In fact, many users freely admitted that they clicked the link simply because it had “Sexy” in the title. Whether that converts to buyers, regular users, whatever is up for debate. I certainly noticed a sharp uprise in ad revenue on those two days, however that is to be expected really – it was nothing that wasn’t out of line with the uprise in visitor numbers.

Let the graph above put the debate to bed – “Sexy” will get you eyeballs! It may however, not get you conversions!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.