Here’s an AI-powered guide for writing impactful native ad headlines

With audiences grappling with a massive surplus in content and deficit of attention, the headline has become the most important thing brands need to get right to make an impact with their in-feed native ad campaigns. Consumers are living inside their content feeds, typically spending three hours a day inside apps. More and more, people read headlines while watching muted videos.

Welcome to the new era of straightforwardness

Recent Sharethrough research on Millennial experiences with native ads found that 91 percent of them primarily rely on social or content feeds to discover new things. In this same study, 1-in-5 Millennials said that they read headlines exclusively.

There’s an expectation that the explosion in available content and increasing reliance on headlines can only lead to a rise in cheap-trick, clickbait-styled headlines. But at Sharethrough, we’ve seen the opposite. With increasingly high demands on audience attention, brands need to be more straight-forward and human than ever in the way they present information to audiences. Successful headlines today engage the brain, communicating an idea at the moment of impression while still enticing readers to click through to a full content experience.

Headline quality score Sharethough ()

Introducing an AI-powered guide for better native headlines

At Sharethrough, we’ve been using data science and linguistic analysis for years to understand how these new media dynamics are affecting brands. As a result, we’re excited to announce our new AI-powered headline analyser, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool that puts this wealth of proprietary knowledge at brands’ fingertips for the first time. This new tool is free for anyone looking to navigate the new pressures and demands in content marketing, helping them analyse and quickly improve the quality of their headlines, optimising for both impression and engagement.

Our AI headline analyzer offers insights into how language choices affect the value of each impression, which draws upon thousands of campaigns and headlines that have run through the Sharethrough Exchange. It includes findings from research conducted by Sharethrough with Nielsen Neuro Labs, which looked at the subconscious impact of different words on the human-brain and identified four categories of ‘Context Words’ that impact emotional engagement.

We combined this neuro-linguistic programming with a multivariate regression algorithm that helps to improve clickthrough rates: breaking down 312 unique variables, including EEG data and Natural Language Processing, and analysing headlines for words from 21 statistically significant dictionaries.

Our headline analyzer does more than simply help brands be more engaging; it helps them make a more lasting impression on the vast majority of people that will never click on their in-feed ads. Because optimising for engagement alone may draw in one per cent more people, but optimising for impression can influence the behaviour and perception for the other 99 per cent.

Read more of this article by Sharethrough.

Sharethrough is a member of FIPP.

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