Submission + - Who Are the Heavy Clickers? 3
Reservoir Hill writes: "While focusing on clicks makes a lot of sense in search advertising, since the audience has already been highly qualified by their search term and is "hand-raising" — announcing their interest in a particular product or service or activity — what about banner ads on Web pages where the audience is not in an active search-and-buy mode? Dave Morgan has an interesting post on his blog about research done analyzing behavioral and click data to determine who clicks on banner ads, and whether they are different than the Web population in general. 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. Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. They are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers. Morgan makes the point that focusing banner ad campaigns to optimize on clicks means skewing campaigns to optimize on middle-aged women from the Midwest."