Conservatives are more likely to click sponsored ads than liberals: study

Politics even plays a role in who trusts sponsored advertisements online.

A new study published by Alexander Davidson, Associate Professor of Marketing at Wayne State University, found that conservatives are more likely to click sponsored search results than liberals are.

To get the results, Davidson first examined data from over 500,000 visitors to a nationwide retailers website. He analyzed who got to the website by clicking a search ad versus an organic link, as well as the share of each state’s residents who identify themselves as conservative.

The data showed a 10% increase in a state’s conservative identity was associated with a 6.4% increase in search ad clicks.

Davidson also found a connection between conservatives and search ad clicks by looking at each state’s median age and per-capita personal income. 

He pointed out that conservatives are typically older and have higher incomes than liberals.

The study also involved bringing online participants to a search results page and asking them how likely they were to click on the search ad as opposed to the organic link.

This time, their political affiliations were discovered either by self-identification and attitudes toward political issues.

Once again, conservative participants were found to be more likely to click on the search ads.

“The decision to click on an ad – or not – might seem quite minor,” Davidson wrote in his study. “But I believe ad avoidance is strongly rooted in people’s core beliefs and values.”

In his final analysis, Davidson created search ads for a website built for this research and found that conservatives were more likely to click the sponsored ads, such as “Buy headphones.”

However, more detailed searches like “Buy headphones with microphone that reduces background noise” didn’t show a relationship between political affiliation and the clicks.

Davidson speculated that was because broad searches are less cognitively demanding, so participants make their decision based on their core beliefs and life outlooks.

“On the other hand,” Davidson said, “I argue that specific searches require us to pay close attention to the information we are processing, which disables our core beliefs from being the primary influence on our decisions.”

Overall, Davidson said advertisers should use these research findings to their advantage. He said they need to come up with alternative ways to get liberals to click sponsored ads, such as using star ratings or credible endorsements.

According to his online profile, Davidson’s research explores consumer behavior with an emphasis on political and public policy issues.