Are Microsoft Users More Gullible When It Comes To Online Advertising? | Hacker News Reader

Are Microsoft Users More Gullible When It Comes To Online Advertising?

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18 pointsanuleczka20 comments

Although I'm no advertising guru, I'm pretty sure that it's safe to say that the users of Safari, Chrome and Firefox are more internet savvy than the users of Internet Explorer. For example, most people involved in technology seem to use everything except Internet Explorer, and they are often the same people who do not click on ads.

From the above logic, you'll quickly realize that each savvy user who avoids using Internet Explorer also avoids ads on the new browser of their choice, which is pretty much changing the scales to the tune of a factor of two.

I don't see why this is news to anyone on HN.

IMO it also shows that people shouldn't worry about adblock (any more than they worry about lynx anyway). The people blocking ads are not clicking on them anyway.

Advertising isn't all click-oriented direct response, like mortgage lead generation. Branded display advertising is rarely clicked, but viewing it has a measurable effect on user behavior later.

Fred Wilson's got a decent summary of a comScore study on exactly this:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/display-adverti.html

A little searching will dig up additional studies. While many of these are somewhat self-serving, I've also seen some more academic work with similar results.

I don't know whether the people blocking ads would've displayed atypical post-viewing behavior - it's an interesting question. We're rarely conscious of the influence of display advertising on our decisions, so I suspect even people who actively resist clicking ads have value to a brand marketer.

In any case, it's not the advertisers that worry about ad blocking, it's the publishers. As long as the display advertising is sold on a CPM basis (which is common on larger, higher-quality sites), anything that blocks a request to an adserver reduces their revenue, whether you would've clicked the ad or not.

I would toss Safari out of that group. As the default Mac browser its user base is going to include a significant chunk of people who just use it because it's there -- which is the same as the ignorant ie user.

Lately it seems that every quarter Apple announces better computer sales...they are expanding their market to more and more home users who are going be 'less internet savvy.' Call it the halo effect or just a better product, but Apple defines mainstream retail computer sales right now. See http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10409462-37.html

The word 'gullible' implies that the ads are meant to take advantage of the user; I think that's an unfair assumption.

Perhaps 'receptive' would be more accurate?

Outside of Adsense, the great majority of ads I see are ugly Flash banners advertising weight-loss treatments with dubiously verified effectiveness. I don't think it is an assumption, I think it is an observation.

As to the data they collected, that doesn't seem very surprising at all. Firefox users like their Adblock, and Chrome users mostly complain that they don't have Adblock yet.

Unfortunately, the weight-loss ads have invaded Adsense too.

I agree that the data isn't surprising, but I don't think the headline should frame it as a slight against IE users.

Also, I think that people overestimate the influence of Adblock, even among Firefox users.

Not only ads -- we always joke that Firefox users are cheap bastards (although now Chrome is taking over that distinction) -- here are the conversion rates for a small online apparel retailer for the last month:

IE 3.68%

Safari 2.87%

Firefox 2.73%

Chrome 1.96%

It seems obvious to me that this is so. Not because more tech-savvy users (who tend to favor Firefox, Chrome, etc.) are cheapskates but rather precisely because they know what they're doing. Less savvy users are simply paying (via clicking on ads) for more direct help, whereas more savvy users are helping themselves.

Think about it, a less experienced user is more likely to click an ad because they may not have the skills (or the confidence) to track down where to buy the advertised item on their own. Whereas a more experienced user is more likely to be able to go to their favorite online store to find an item, search several sites to find the best deal, look at competing products to compare features, etc.

It's no different than any brick and mortar store. The level of help the sales clerks tend to provide is very disproportionate, some people know exactly what they want and need no help, others need a lot of hand holding. The difference online is that we have a lot more metrics about these sorts of things.

That is interesting. But to determine whether a certain set of users is cheaper than another a better metric would be to determine the per visit value of a user. This would take into account that Safari or Chrome users might purchase larger quantities or higher value items, even though overall they might purchase less frequently.

True - Safari ranks a bit better here

IE $4.13

Safari $3.95

Firefox $3.03

Chrome $1.98

Do you have a breakdown by IE version?

It'd be interesting to see if IE6 users are providing any value to you. While web developers may gnash their teeth at the mention of IE6, I wonder if there is a financial incentive to continue supporting it. After all, the time to tell users that they need to use a better browser isn't when they come to your site to buy something.

IE6 is just about the same as Firefox on per visit value, and amounts to 7% of our revenue. We can't ignore it (yet), but we certainly don't optimize for it.

It would be helpful to know what sort of ad network was being used, in terms of the content of the ads (teeth-whitening vs. mainstream advertisers) and what sorts of targeting/segmenting (if any) was done based on variables like domain/location, browser and OS type, etc.

As for whether Microsoft users are more gullible, I think the limitations of IE and the demographic profile of its users relative to Firefox and Chrome could explain this trend.

My hypothesis: Microsoft users are more likely to be using older flavors of IE, which do not have as good ad-blocking support or extensions to disable rich media ads.

Even on new versions, users may not know how to find or configure the pop-up blocker. In IE8, it's under Tools>Pop-up blocker>pop-up blocker settings. This generates an options window whose first field is for personal whitelists. That's followed by two checkboxes and a drop-down menu listing different levels of blocking. That's not the kind of thing my mom would spend much time digging around for or setting up if she used a PC (I set her up with a Mac mini years ago to reduce the number of tech support calls).

For those users who do have PCs and are using IE, I believe they are more likely to see these ads than a Firefox or Chrome user, and therefore are more likely to respond to them, simply because they can't or don't know how to disable ads. In other words, it's not so much about gullibility, but rather how tech savvy they are relative to the people who search out and install Firefox and Chrome.

There are a couple of conclusions one could draw from the data other than the headline; For example, maybe Bing is better at targeting content to users.

It's pretty much taken as gospel truth in SEO/SEM circles that Microsoft's search engine has better conversion rates, and if you're on a tight budget you're better off using MS ads than Google ads. It wasn't unheard-of that a site targeting MS would get 3x the traffic from google, but similar revenue from both. The reasons for this were never really delved into, although a less competition may have helped.

In terms of ad-click rate, I would also wonder if the presence or absence of ad-blocking software has a significant effect.

Mac and Linux users tend to be more tech savvy, although a (likely significant) chunk of Mac users lie at the opposite end of the spectrum.

We're also at an advantage because it's very clear that the ads that fake the Windows UI are not real system messages telling us to upgrade our antivirus.

Also, "dupe" is entirely correct in this context. Ads on the web are often trying to trick someone into something, outside our world of geeky blogs w/ unobtrusive adsense.

As mentioned in the TC comments, Bing's cashback program has had some excellent rebates recently (20% cashback from Wal-mart for example) which needs to be taken into consideration.

I don't see any statistics normalizing those percentages though. Maybe normalizing isn't the right word. What I mean is what is the percentage of browser users clicking through weighted by browser share.

Obviously if there are more IE/Windows users, there is going to be a higher percentage (in aggregate) than others. Browsers are not evenly distributed.

Perhaps this is shown in the original data, but I see no indication of that in this article.

This blog posts seems to prove the opposite: Safari users are most likely to spend: http://axod.blogspot.com/2009/06/revenue-browser.html

Apple products tend to be used by a particular demographic while everyone else uses Microsoft. Is it really a surprise that the largest user base also has the most "gullible" people?

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