What the Call-to-Action Tester checks
A call to action (CTA) is the instruction at the end of a piece of copy that tells the reader what to do next: 'Buy now', 'Send your brief', 'Score your headline'. The Call-to-Action Tester takes the CTA text you give it and checks it against the criteria that decide whether a CTA gives the reader a reason to act: its length, whether the verb names a specific action, and whether it leans on vague filler phrases such as 'learn more' or 'click here'. It returns a score and a short note on what pulled that score up or down, so you can see which part of the wording needs work.
The tool can only judge the words in front of it. It has no view of your product, your audience, or the page the CTA sits on, so a CTA that scores well can still be wrong for your business, and one that scores poorly can still be the right call in context. Treat the score as a prompt to look again at the wording.
What makes a call to action work
A CTA is a promise: it tells the reader what happens next. 'Learn more' promises nothing, because 'more' could mean anything from a video to a fourteen-page brochure, and a reader with no idea what waits on the other side of a click has no particular reason to make it. 'Score your headline' promises something specific: the reader gives you a headline, the tool gives them a score. The difference is not politeness or tone. It is that one sentence names an outcome and the other does not.
The same test applies to verbs. 'Get started' and 'Discover more' are common on homepages because they ask nothing of the writer, but they also tell the reader nothing, so they sit at the weak end of any CTA. 'Send your brief', 'Check your reading age', 'See UK copywriting companies' each name the actual action and the actual result. When you are stuck for a CTA, finish this sentence instead: 'When the reader clicks this, they will...' Whatever completes that sentence honestly is closer to the CTA you need than whatever sounded punchiest first.
A worked example
Take a signup button on a small SaaS product's homepage. 'Get started' is the default choice, and it is also the weakest one available: it describes an intention without describing an outcome, so a reader deciding whether to click has nothing concrete to weigh up. 'Start your free 14-day trial' is stronger, because it tells the reader exactly what they are agreeing to and removes the guess about cost. Between those two, the second version does more work with roughly the same number of words, and that is the trade the tool is built to help you spot.
Reading the score
The score is not a mark out of ten to chase for its own sake. It is a way of surfacing the specific weaknesses that make a CTA easy to skip past, so you can fix the actual problem. Common issues the tool flags include:
- A verb that describes a feeling or an intention ('discover', 'explore')
- A CTA that is too long to read at a glance, so the reader has moved on before finishing it
- Vague phrases that ask for a click without saying what follows it ('learn more', 'click here', 'find out')
- Urgency language borrowed from a template ('act now', 'don't miss out')
None of these on their own sink a CTA. A short CTA with a plain verb can outperform a long, careful one, and the right length depends on where the CTA sits, whether that is a button, a link inside body copy, or a subject line. The tool's job is to point at the pattern.
What the tool cannot see
The Call-to-Action Tester works from the text alone, so it cannot tell whether your CTA matches the promise made earlier in the page, whether your audience already trusts you enough to click on something short, or whether the action you are asking for is one your reader can actually complete in one step. A CTA that scores badly here might still be exactly right for a specific audience or a specific brand voice, and a CTA that scores well can still mislead a reader if the page behind it does not deliver on the promise. The score is a starting point for judgement, not a substitute for it, and it can be wrong about a CTA that works well in its actual context.
For the reasoning behind CTA writing in full, including how a CTA fits into the wider structure of a page, see How to Write a Call to Action. The term itself, along with related terms like above the fold and conversion copy, is defined in the glossary.