When painting the portrait of a user who is likely to click on ads, it’s always interesting to use their technographic profile – that is, what technologies does this person use to browse the Internet. We’ve already looked into operating system, showing that Windows users are more likely to click ads than Mac or Linux users, and now we come to web browsers.
You would expect, given this information, that Internet Explorer would be uncontested at the top of the ad-click mountain. After examining a sample of traffic across the Chitika network, we found that, if you expected that, you’d be right – IE is, indeed, the browser with the highest clickthrough rates. Surprisingly, Opera is in second place, well ahead of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
What does it mean? I’ve long contended that the more non-standard choices someone uses to browse the Internet – like someone who goes out of their way to install Chrome instead of using the preinstalled IE – the less likely they are to click on ads. For the most part, examples we examine hold this to be an accurate statement.
So again, we go to our analytics solution to see what kind of traffic our site is getting. Chitika Insights is an interesting example, as our readers use both Chrome and Firefox much more often than they do Internet Explorer. Indeed, even Safari is neck-and-neck with IE when it comes to you all out there in Insights Readerville.
If the Portrait of a Clicker technographic targeting theory holds true, Insights should see much lower ad click rates than a site that gets more Internet Explorer traffic.
Publishers, do you see this phenomenon in your traffic? Do your users on IE (and Windows) click on ads more often than your 3rd-party-browser-using users? Let us know in the comments.