Word Count Data-Mining Study
I went data mining (means to drill figuratively into a database to analyze data or data about data (meta-data)) to try and prove my gut feeling that articles less than 500 words outperform articles with more than 500 words in terms of total page views of traffic earned per article.
Over time, I found my hypothesis to be true, but it was only true over time and almost never true in the short-term. Check out the 6 charts below that cover my 27 day analysis period of 2005 vs. 2006 for various word count ranges:
Here is a chart for the first 27 days of September 2005:
ime Period 2005-9-1 to 2005-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 500 | Articles < 500 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 4,522 | 4,574 |
Total Views | 2,481,420 | 2,743,964 |
Average Views | 548 | 599 |
Compared to the first 27 days of 2006:
Time Period 2006-9-1 to 2006-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 500 | Articles < 500 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 8,439 | 10,857 |
Total Views | 616,624 | 730,602 |
Average Views | 73 | 67 |
Mini-Conclusion based on 500 word analysis: In the short-term, shorter articles receive less traffic than larger articles, but over the long-term, shorter articles outperform longer articles. However, the difference is negligible.
750 Word, 27 days of Sept 2005 vs. 2006 analysis:
Time Period 2005-9-1 to 2005-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 750 | Articles < 750 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 1,981 | 7,115 |
Total Views | 1,030,876 | 4,194,576 |
Average Views | 520 | 589 |
Notice that the 2005 articles less than 750 words outperformed articles more than 750 words.
Time Period 2006-9-1 to 2006-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 750 | Articles < 750 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 2,842 | 16,463 |
Total Views | 199,280 | 1,148,447 |
Average Views | 70 | 69 |
Mini-Conclusion based on 750 word analysis: In the short-term, articles in the 750 word count range perform the same, but over the long-term, articles less than 750 words outperform articles with more than 750 words.
This same conclusions held true as I continued to run tests with higher word counts.
The only time the conclusion reversed itself is when I drilled into the 250 word count range:
250 Word, 27 days of Sept 2005 vs 2006 analysis:
Time Period 2005-9-1 to 2005-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 250 | Articles < 250 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 8,667 | 429 |
Total Views | 4,983,966 | 241,561 |
Average Views | 575 | 563 |
And here is the same stats for 2006:
Time Period 2006-9-1 to 2006-9-27 | ||
Word Amount | Articles >= 250 | Articles < 250 |
---|---|---|
Total Articles | 18,079 | 1,230 |
Total Views | 1,263,572 | 84,897 |
Average Views | 69 | 69 |
Mini-Conclusion based on 250 word analysis: In the short-term, 250 word articles perform the same as articles with more than 250 words, but over the long-term, articles greater than 250 words outperform articles with less than 250 words by a very insignificant margin.
I’m not sure I’ve proven anything here as the differences in results appears to be statistically insignificant, but perhaps I’ve proven that writing shorter word count articles (500 word count range), you won’t be penalized in traffic vs. longer articles and you might as well write (2) 500 word articles instead of (1) 1000 word article.
What conclusions did you pull from this data-mining exercise?
Interesting study. I’m confused about the pageviews though…was traffic really that much better 1 year ago?
Max
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