Conservatives are more likely to trust sponsored ads heres why politics plays a role in clicks: study

Politics even plays a role in who trusts sponsored advertisements online.A new study published by Alexander Davidson, Associate Professor of Marketing at Wayne State University, found that conservatives are more likely to click sponsored search results than liberals which stems from their fundamental trust in the marketplace.To get the results, Davidson first examined data from over 500,000 visitors to a nationwide retailers website.

He analyzed who got to the website by clicking a search ad versus an organic link, as well as the share of each state’s residents who identify themselves as conservative.The data showed a 10% increase in a state’s conservative identity was associated with a 6.4% increase in search ad clicks.Davidson also found a connection between conservatives and search ad clicks by looking at each state’s median age and per-capita personal income. He pointed out that conservatives are typically older and have higher incomes than liberals.The study also involved bringing online participants to a search results page and asking them how likely they were to click on the search ad as opposed to the organic link.This time, their political affiliations were discovered either by self-identification and attitudes toward political issues.Once again, conservative participants were found to be more likely to click on the search ads.“The decision to click on an ad – or not – might seem quite minor,” Davidson wrote in his study.

“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,” he continued.“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.”In his final analysis, Davidson created search ads for a website built for this research and found that conservatives...