Your politics can affect whether you click on sponsored search results, new research shows

Good news for digital marketers. Boy Wirat/Getty Images

American businesses spend close to US$100 billion each year to secure top advertising spots in search engine results – even though it’s not exactly a secret that most online shoppers scroll right past them.

In fact, organic links – results that aren’t sponsored advertisements – can receive up to 10 times as many clicks as search ads, industry data shows.

I refer to this phenomenon as “search ad avoidance,” and it’s a big problem for the multibillion-dollar industry. But it turns out that not all groups are equally averse to clicking on sponsored search results.

According to my newly published peer-reviewed research, people with conservative political views are more likely to click on sponsored search results.

Republican-leaning brands such as Black Rifle Coffee Company might want to take note.

Conservatives are more likely to click search ads

To explore the relationship between politics and search engine behavior, I conducted several studies.

First, I examined data from more than 500,000 visitors to a nationwide retailer’s website. I analyzed the percentage of visitors from each U.S. state who arrived at the website by clicking a search ad versus an organic link. Then I looked at the share of each state’s residents who describe themselves as conservative.

I found that more conservative states were associated with more clicks for search ads over organic links. Specifically, a 10% increase in a state’s conservative identity was associated with a 6.4% increase in search ad clicks.

Given that, on average, conservatives are older and have higher incomes than liberals, I also looked at each state’s median age and per-capita personal income. Again, the data confirmed the relationship between conservatism and search ad clicks. Neither age nor income had any significant impact.

To better understand what was going on, I conducted additional studies where I could monitor people’s searches in a more controlled setting using online surveys.

I asked online participants to search for a product the same way they would using Google. Then, I brought them to a search results page and asked them to indicate how likely they would be to click on a search ad versus an organic link.

I also measured their political orientation in two different ways: through self-identification and attitudes toward political issues. Once again, I found that regardless of age or income, more conservative people were more likely to click on search ads.

Why the promotional is political

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

While conservatives tend to trust and justify the role of marketplace systems, liberals are more skeptical. Within the marketplace of online information search, I argue that conservatives are likely to be more trusting of sponsored communications than liberals, who lean toward organic content.

The importance of values becomes clear in a final analysis I conducted. In this real-world experiment, I created search ads for a website built specifically for this research and found that conservatives were more likely to click ads in response to broad searches, such as “Buy headphones.” But for more specific, detailed searches – for example, “Buy headphones with microphone that reduces background noise” – there was no relationship between politics and clicks.

I suspect this is because broad searches are less cognitively demanding – in other words, they require less brainpower. This allows our core beliefs to influence our decisions. In fact, this is consistent with research on information processing that shows broad thinking leads to stronger political attitudes.

On the other hand, 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.

Why advertisers should take note

These findings have obvious benefits for advertisers who want to better understand who’s most likely to click on search ads. This can help them generate campaign strategies that account for consumers’ political orientations, which I have shown to be a better predictor of click behavior than typical segmentation variables such as age or income.

Given that liberals are less likely to click search ads, it also suggests advertisers should be thinking about alternative ways to reach them. It’s possible that liberals could be persuaded to click search ads through a greater inclusion of trust symbols in advertising communications, such as star ratings or endorsements from credible influencers.

Alexander Davidson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.