The Words that Sell Beauty: An Analysis of 11,000 Products

If you could find the exact words and phrases that could boost your sales online, wouldn’t you use them? We analyzed the titles of 11,000 beauty products—correlating the words they most commonly used with their sales to find out how you can do just that.

And the results surprised us:

In contrast, below are some words in titles that hurt sales:

The Price-Popularity Matrix: What words indicate premium vs. low-cost products?

We plotted the most frequent adjectives in beauty product titles to see if they were associated with premium, more expensive products or, in contrast, with mass, common products. Turns out, there is.

For product titles, words such as “easy,” “original,” and “portable” come into prominence, in the hopes of highlighting features that the searcher wants to see.

Longer titles lead to less sales…

Our study for the beauty industry confirms an outspoken rule in marketing: people don’t read.

The Sortlist analysis shows that the longer the title of a beauty product, the less likely people are to purchase it.

… and cheaper products

Longer titles are also correlated with less expensive products in the beauty industry.

Beauty prices plateau if the product title exceeds 8 words, according to our data.

It’s a phenomenon that could be explained by both customers’ short attention span and merchants’ need for sales without sacrificing quality in their listings.

Action point: Make sure your beauty product has a title that does not exceed 8-10 words.

Similarly, we compiled the words and phrases that appear in beauty product descriptions by confirmed number of sales:

Among those that sell the least are “all skin types” and “for sensitive”:

Will long descriptions help sell beauty products?

The description length of a product seems to be directly related to its price: our analysis of 1352 beauty products says that higher-priced items tend to have a larger amount of text in their descriptions.

The correlation in the graph shows a clear upward trend between description length and price.

As a rule of thumb, high-priced items use longer descriptions to provide more information and justify a higher value or reflect a more complex product.

Still, the significant spread of the data points at higher word counts indicates that longer descriptions do not guarantee a higher price point, and pricing strategies are likely influenced by a combination of factors including brand, quality, market positioning, and consumer perception.

Action point: Create product descriptions no shorter than 300 words for your beauty products to justify high prices.

To format or not to format: The readability of product descriptions has no impact on sales

An interesting insight that our data has revealed is that the formatting of beauty product descriptions has relatively little effect on the number of sales, although these tend to increase slightly with better readability.

A clear trend is seen in the graph, in which products that have received more than 10,000 reviews have a product description that is “fairly difficult to read” (around 60/100), or the equivalent of a 15-year-old’s reading level.
That’s at least according to the Flesch Reading Ease test, designed to indicate how difficult a passage in English is to understand; the higher the score for any text, the easier it is to read.

Action point: Add bullet points, bold texts, and short sentences to your beauty product descriptions to improve readability and boost sales.

Our study shows almost none of the best-selling products have emojis in their descriptions.

Still, there seems to be a sweet spot in the number of emojis used that correlates with a higher number of sales, specifically at six emojis.

Could this be an opportunity for merchants to increase sales?

It may be worth a try, but it’s also important to bear in mind that too many emojis could have a detrimental effect, perhaps because they may make the description appear cluttered or less serious.

The world of online stores is one that keeps evolving—but 11,000 products can’t lie. If you stick to some of the words and phrases that are common in the titles and descriptions of the best-selling beauty items, you’re bound to find success.

Remember: 8-10 words is the optimal title length for your products. And make you include terms that are shown to boost sales like “paraben-free” and “professional.”

For product descriptions, readability is key. First of all, make sure to include bullet points and bold texts, and keep the entire description at 300 words for your beauty products. If you’re worried about reducing your original text to adjust for this limit, make your sentences shorter.

And finally, try using 6 emojis in your descriptions to see if they impact your sales!

This report was completed between March 27th and April 3rd, 2024. The findings are the result of a scraping process of over 11,000 product titles and descriptions of Amazon.com’s best-selling items across the Beauty category.