How to Write a Product Tagline and Description That Works

Nobody reads your listing. They scan it.

In the Nielsen Norman Group's research on how people read web pages, 79 percent of test users always scanned any new page and only 16 percent read word by word. Those were lab sessions from 1997, so don't take the figures as a forecast for your visitors. But the later eye tracking work points the same way. In an eye tracking study of 232 users, readers moved across the top of the content, then a shorter way across below it, then down the left edge. The group says a study eleven years later confirmed those findings.

The consequence is blunt. Your tagline and the first lines of your description do most of the work, and the rest is read by the few who stay. The group's advice from that eye tracking study is to put the most important information in the first two paragraphs and to start headings, paragraphs and bullets with words that carry information, because readers look at the third word on a line much less often than the first two.

Where your words end up

Three pieces of text, written once, show up in many places.

On RadarMakers the tagline sits on every product card. It also becomes the second half of your page title, which is built as the product name, a colon, and the tagline. The first sentence of your description becomes the page description, cut to 155 characters. Search engines and link previews can show it.

The form checks length, not meaning. A tagline must be 15 to 80 characters, a description at least 120, and the tagline can't just repeat the product name. A sentence that says nothing passes all three checks. The rest of this guide is about what the form can't check.

Say what it is in one clear line

A tagline has one job. It tells a stranger what the product is and does.

Product Hunt asks for the same thing in its launch guide. Its tagline is capped at 60 characters, and the guide asks for a very short description of the product with no gimmicks or over-the-top language. It adds that you shouldn't make it hard for people to understand what the product does, and that the tagline is typically the main element that drives someone to click from the homepage. Its good example reads "Send your friends a voicemail meow from a real cat." The example it rejects is "The most ameozing app in the app store."

Here is a test you can run on your own line. Swap in a competitor's name. If the sentence is still true, it wasn't saying anything about your product. This is a rule of thumb, not a finding from the sources, but it sorts taglines quickly.

The examples below are for an imagined product that summarizes recorded meetings.

All three fit the form's limits. Only two say something.

Why does the promotional line cost you? The Nielsen Norman Group tested five versions of the same sample website with 51 users. One was written in what they call marketese, with boastful and subjective claims. Another kept the claims but cut the text to about half the words. A third kept the claims but added headings, lists and bold keywords. A fourth stripped the boasting and kept the facts. The last combined all three changes. Measured usability against the promotional version was 58 percent higher for the concise one, 47 percent for the scannable one, 27 percent for the objective one, and 124 percent for the combined one.

Read that with care. It was one sample site and a 1997 lab. For the objective version, task time, errors, memory and the time to recall the site structure pointed in the right direction without reaching statistical significance, although satisfaction did reach it. The authors' guess is that promotional language makes readers spend effort filtering out the hype. Treat the percentages as a direction, not a promise.

One more thing to avoid. Google's guidance on titles warns against keyword stuffing and gives the example "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars", which doesn't help the user. A tagline that lists search terms is the same mistake in a smaller box.

Say who it is for

The Nielsen Norman Group's advice on plain language is short enough to remember: avoid writing for everyone, because when you write for everyone, you write for no one. Product Hunt says the same in its advice for the maker's first comment. You can't be everything to everybody, and the community appreciates it when you show that you know who your target users are. If you aren't sure yet, it suggests presenting a few use cases you've noticed.

The same plain language guidance has a warning for product names and features you invented. Branded terms take a long time to enter public vocabulary, so replace them, or at least accompany them with an explicit term. Use the word your reader would type into a search box.

Now the description. The form's own hint is the outline: describe what it does, who it is for, and what makes it different. Put the first two in the first sentence. That sentence is the one that becomes your page description, so it has to work alone.

Compare two descriptions of the imagined product. Both are about fifty words.

Recapper is a revolutionary, cutting-edge platform that is transforming the way modern teams think about meetings. Our best-in-class AI delivers unparalleled results, so you will never have to worry about meetings again. It is the ultimate solution for teams that want to take their productivity to the next level.

Recapper turns a recorded meeting into a written summary with the decisions and action items listed separately. It is built for small remote teams that hold several calls a day and have nobody to take notes. Upload a recording, read the summary, edit it, and share it with the team.

The first has 49 words in 3 sentences, the second has 50 words in 3 sentences. Same length, same rhythm. Run the swap test sentence by sentence and the first one survives every swap. The second names an input, an output, a reader and an action. The length didn't change. The content did.

Keep the rest of the description easy to scan, because that is how it will be read. The plain language guidance recommends sentences of no more than 15 to 20 words and one idea per paragraph, and says paragraphs of one or two sentences are fine. Use informative headings, bullets and tables to simplify complex content, and write the conclusion first.

Show the benefit

A feature is what the product has. A benefit is what changes for the person using it. Time saved is one example, and it's the one the clock above stands for. Fewer mistakes, less money spent, or a task that was impossible and now isn't are others.

How do you state a benefit without sounding like marketese? Replace the adjective with something the reader can check. The Nielsen Norman Group's own example is a paragraph that claimed a state was "filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail." The objective version said the state has several attractions and listed named places with real visitor counts. The facts did the persuading that the adjectives couldn't.

For you that means two rules.

• Use a number only if you measured it. "Saves time" is a claim. "Replaces the 30 minutes you spend writing notes after each call" is a fact if you timed it, and a lie if you didn't.
• If you can't measure it, describe the task and the result in plain words and leave the number out.

Put the benefit near the top for another reason. Google says a good meta description is like a pitch that convinces the user the page is what they're looking for, and that it should summarize the page. Its examples are worth a look. "Mechanical pencil" is too short. A list of sewing supplies is a pile of keywords. A paragraph about picking eggs as a child doesn't summarize a recipe page. The better versions say what the page is and give specific details. Google also says it decides what to show, sometimes using text from the page instead of the description, and that snippets are cut to fit the device width. So don't count on one exact sentence. Make the first sentence of the page good, and the rest follows.

A short checklist

Before you submit, check these.

• The tagline says what the product does, and it still fails when you swap in a competitor's name.
• It is 15 to 80 characters and it isn't your product name.
• It has no keyword list.
• The first sentence of the description says what it does and who it is for, and it is under 155 characters.
• Each paragraph has one idea, and the sentences stay within 15 to 20 words.
• Every claim is a fact or a number you measured.
• Every term is one your reader would use themselves.

You can check the last step with the meta tag preview tool, which shows how a title and description can look as a search result, and the social card preview tool for the link card people see when someone shares your page. Both are among the free maker tools.

When the text is ready, submit your product. The launch checklist has a positioning step that asks for one sentence naming your intended user, the problem and the outcome. Write that sentence first, and the tagline and description mostly write themselves.

Sources

Every page below was read in full before this guide was written. Where a source gave a figure, it is the figure used here.

• Nielsen Norman Group, How Users Read on the Web: the 79 and 16 percent figures, scannable text and marketese.
• Nielsen Norman Group, Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web: the 51 user study, the five versions and the 58, 47, 27 and 124 percent figures, and the caveat about significance.
• Nielsen Norman Group, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content: the 232 user eye tracking study and what to put in the first two paragraphs.
• Nielsen Norman Group, Plain Language Is for Everyone, Even Experts: writing for everyone, branded terms and sentence length.
• Google Search Central, Influencing your title links in search results: concise titles and keyword stuffing.
• Google Search Central, Control your snippets in search results: meta descriptions and how snippets are created.
• Product Hunt, Preparing for launch: the tagline guidance and writing for a specific audience.

The meeting summary product in the examples is imagined. The limits and the way titles and descriptions are built are how RadarMakers works today.