The Dollar Factory

Understanding ad clickers

I often wondered who are the people that click on text ads on websites and on search engine result pages? Myself, I never felt the need to click on an ad and as far as I can remember I may never have clicked on one even though I am not blocking ads on my browser. I think part of the reason for not clicking has to do with the fact that I hardly ever buy anything online. I say hardly ever because my only online purchases so far have been books that I have specifically looked for on Amazon.

Many of my friends who are not webmasters have also told me that they hardly ever (if at all) click on ads. The more technically oriented of them block ads in the first place but then non-techies also admit that they belong to the group of non-clickers. This often made me wonder which people actually click on ads; I run a number of websites and I know that 4-10% of the sites’ visitors do click.

So, I was intrigued when I read Danah Boyd’s blog post titled “Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?” In her article, Danah explains that studies show the class of ad clickers to be,

…predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

Using this and other studies as a guide, Danah concludes that the heave ad clickers are most likely those,

• More representative of lower income households than the average user.
• Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
• More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
• More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

Of course this is not the end of the story. There is still much that is unknown about the people who click on ads and make purchases online. However, you are going to receive more clicks if your website visitors belong to the categories listed above. So, you might want to use these categories as a guide when deciding on the niche for your next online project.