Effects of verbatim repetition of the headline message on the proceed button on click-through rates in online retail

Florian Kutzner; Florian K G Ermark; Julian Fornoff; Michaela Wänke

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1187798

Effects of verbatim repetition of the headline message on the proceed button on click-through rates in online retail

Front Psychol. 2024 Aug 22:15:1187798. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1187798. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Florian Kutzner¹, Florian K G Ermark², Julian Fornoff³, Michaela Wänke³

Affiliations

¹ Department for Economic and Consumer Psychology, Seeburg Castle University, Seekirchen am Wallersee, Austria.
² Institute of Psychology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
³ Department of Consumer and Economic Psychology, School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany.

Abstract

For online retailers, increasing click-through rates and reducing dropout rates are critical to success. In this study, we examine the effect of verbatim repetition of the website's headline message on the proceed button, based on research on processing fluency. In our field study involving 956 online platform visitors, we found that verbatim repetitions of the header message on the proceed button resulted in an increase in the conversion rate by more than 10 percentage points compared to gist repetitions and new messages. Our findings highlight the importance of simple verbatim features and demonstrate the successful application of processing fluency research to impact consumer behavior.

Keywords: click-through rate; conceptual fluency; field experiment; online shopping; processing fluency; repetition.