Google Search vs Google Adsense

There a popular discussion recently, about Bing users being more likely to click on ads. I seriously don’t understand the big deal of this revelation. For the uninitiated, Chitika recently released report saying that Google Search users (with 0.97% ad click rate) are less likely to click on advertisements than Microsoft Bing users (with 1.50% ad click rate). Yahoo Search is somewhere in middle with 1.24% ad click rate.

There is nothing new here. Though I never measured the exact number, I have long known that Google Search users are least likely to click on advertisements, including those served by Google Adsense. I believe most of experienced webmasters will know this too.

The actual reason, I believe, is different from what they have represented. After all, Chitika don’t serve ads on their own site, do they? So they don’t know.

One reading of this data is might be that Bing users are more susceptible to ads, and in fact may have used Bing in the first place because of the Bing ads Microsoft is plastering all over the place. (Kinda makes you wonder what will happen when that ad budget goes away).

But a more likely explanation is that Google represents the vast bulk of the traffic, 83 percent to be exact. Bing only represents 8 percent. There is a law of large numbers at work here. The more traffic that comes from any one source (i.e., Google), the lower the clickthrough rate is likely to trend. If the market share was reversed, Bing would undoubtedly have a lower clickthrough rate.

What law of large numbers?!! That is simply nonsense. In some of my sites, Yahoo users represents the majority of traffic source, but they are still more likely to click on ads than Google users.

So what is the actual reason?
It all boils down to user savviness. Visitors coming from Google Search represents the most savvy portion of web users, with almost all of the younger generations prefer Google than Yahoo or Bing. Yahoo users ranks second in term of user savviness. Bing users rank last. Just think about it. Who else will use Bing if actually they are aware of better search engines like Google.

This affect can be observed not only for the ad click rate, but also other matrix, like the bounce rate and pageview per user, time on site.

Savvy web users are much more likely to leave your site if they cannot find anything interesting in the first glance (thus bounced). They know there are myriads of other websites that can give what they want. They are also much more susceptible to “banner-blindness”, ignoring anything and everything that looks like adverts.

Less savvy web users are more likely to spend more time in your website, clicking on a few more pages trying to see if they have missed out something, and in the process are also paying more attention to the ads displayed.

See the report at Tech Crunch.