What kind of person clicks ads? – AdSense Research

Something that has bothered me for a long time is this obsession with knowing who is clicking  the advertisements. And when I say who, I am speaking stereotypically. Are clickers in their 20s, 30s, 40s? Male or female? Is there a super demographic that separates clickers from drifters?

The theory is that every age range has its own CTR – if surfers over the age of 50 don’t click ads, why bother showing them? They’re just dragging the overall CTR down, and as evidence suggests this could incur smart pricing. Not to mention it’s a waste of space, I could put some real content in place of the ad – it’s not all about dimes and dollars you know.

My community site really isn’t the kind of website that does well with AdSense. Does that mean that it can’t? No, at least I don’t think so. There is definitely room for improvement, and so I’m starting a case study to find out what kind of stereotype (if any) clicks ads. Given that the majority of pageviews are from members of the site, I have profile information that I can use to my advantage in evaluating the potential of showing ads.

In this study I want to take into consideration age, gender, length of membership, popularity of member’s own content (based on number of active subscribers), level of community interaction, and probably a bunch of other random variables.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 1:48 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.