WESTBOROUGH, 2/10/2010 – The more college educated a state is, the harder it becomes to advertise to, according to online ad network Chitika’s latest study. The Massachusetts-based company compared the ad click rates of individual states to those states’ rates of college education (from the US Census Bureau’s data), and found a strong inverse relationship.
The two states with the lowest ad click rate, Massachusetts and Washington, showed a much higher rate of college education than the national average. West Virginia, which boasted the highest click rate, also had the lowest percentage of college graduates over the age of 25 in its population. In between, the relationship between low click rate and high college education rate stayed relatively strong.
The study was conducted by Chitika’s research director for online insights, Daniel Ruby, who says the company “wanted a geographic idea of who was interested in ads. By determining that, we could start looking at state-by-state census data and draw some conclusions about what demographics were best to advertise to.”
So what, then, are publishers and advertisers to take away from these findings?
“Obviously, if you’re targeting a more educated demographic, you need to do a better job of making your ad worthwhile,” says Ruby. “This, like everything, is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements.”
About Chitika
Chitika, Inc., is a search-based online advertising network, leading the way in intent-based advertising and search engine insights. Chitika provides publishers with an innovative way to monetize search engine traffic, and advertisers a new way of generating leads with clear consumer intent. With over 60,000 sites and 2 billion monthly impressions, the Chitika network is the pulse of the online world. Through research and targeting, Chitika continually evolves its image as “the ad network that knows when not to show ads.”
For more information, visit http://chitika.com
Contact
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com
Interesting insight! (Makes me proud to be a native son of Massachusetts :).
It’d be great to see a statistical measure of this observation, in addition to the visual (like the Pearson coefficient on the inverse correlation you detect).
Perhaps a scatter plot, with a best-fit lines for both categories of data, would be a more honest representation (lines imply continuity in your data, which are actually 50 pairs of discrete points).
Hi there.
I am a statistician/blogger and would love to have the raw data for further analysis and visualization.
Upon finishing the analysis I will gladly share my results.
All the best,
Tal
Hi Michael,
Thanks to Daniel, I can tell you that the correlation is -0.63.
And upon getting permission for sharing – I will gladly publish the scatter plot (with a nice little regression line with it and some more anecdotes)
Cheers,
Tal
Hi Michael, please see my reply post here:
http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/02/for-fun-correlation-of-us-state-with-the-number-of-clicks-on-online-banners/
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