So, when I was at nextMEDIA, the question of clicking advertisements came up, and out of the sample audience, around 1% actually clicked on advertisements, but none were willing to admit to clicking more than one every couple months or so. This made the person from Google that attended sweat a little as she tried to prove her point: ad clickers are out there.

It really got me wondering if pay per click advertising really has an audience, and no surprise, someone recently wrote about the subject.

Here is a bit from the article at apophenia:

Over the summer, Dave Morgan (AOL Global Advertising Strategy) blogged about a study that they did to investigate who clicks on ads:

What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are 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.

I guess that explains part of the reason why AdSense does so horrible on here, as most of my audience are fairly web savvy, and most likely also fairly advertisement blind. Maybe I should make all my ads bright flashing colours, what do you think?

Originally posted on December 3, 2007 @ 7:43 pm