[walexander]

Bad advice, in my experience.

Anecdotally, I did a website recently for a carpet cleaner. Standard wordpress job with his services and things. At the top of the home page, he wanted a link to a form for redeeming living social coupons, which, not wanting to say "Click Here for", I just made as "Reedem Living Social Coupon".

It turned out after a couple weeks that many of his users were not clicking "Reedem Living Social Coupon", but clicking the "Contact Us" link. As a quick fix, I renamed the link to "Click Here to Redeem Living Social Coupon" and bolded the text. He mentioned a week later that this had a noticeable improvement in people clicking the correct form.

People who use the web for scheduling carpet cleanings are not always the same as the twitter crowd. You need to remember who your audience is, not what all your programmer friends prefer.

(And for some closure, I ended up adding a "coupon code" optional entry on the generic contact form for people who still clicked the wrong one anyway.)

[wpietri]

My cofounder has had similar experiences. I don't have the data handy, but last time I grumbled about a "click here" he told me about a couple of times he A/B tested it and got substantial wins.

I still wouldn't use "click here" in normal writing (e.g., a blog post); I think it's unnecessary and a bit gauche. But I'm happy to do it on landing pages and other places where I really do want people to click there.

[crazygringo]

I think the article applies to "normal" website content, e.g. body text, articles, etc.

Landing pages, big call-to-actions, etc. are a different beast entirely. Especially because it's not always obvious what's a graphic or a link, what's a headline or a link. "Click here" makes it obvious, which is necessary when dealing with anything is not "standard" page content.

[re_todd]

Maybe it was too much text. Once you get over 2 words, the less it looks and feels like a button to someone in a hurry. "Reedem Living Social Coupon" may have just been too long, maybe "Redeem Now!" may have been better.

[mitjak]

Is it? It's tough to say whether the wording was the problem in your case without seeing the site though. Was the link visibly clickable? Was it a button? What would happen if it was a button and it had a Living Social logo on it? Bold text calling out to click sounds more visible and enticing, but there are other ways to grab users' attention.

Yes, you can print an A3 sized sign to remind visitors to flush the toilet, bolding, italicizing and underlining the text to get their attention. Or you can make a clever doodle or an icon, and make it fit into the bathroom's interior design.

[adamesque]

It's possible "redeem" was the culprit word here.

You want your call-to-action verb to match the verb in the user's mind when they visit the site, or they may not recognize it as the action they wanted and skip over it.

I'd guess that people think of coupons as something you "use" more than "redeem", so maybe that'd be a better verb.

But – since it can be tricky to get inside your users' heads like that, I prefer to phrase links like this as a question, like "Have a Living Social coupon?" That way there's much less potential for a mental-model mismatch.