Today in Digital Marketing - The Politics of Search

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, September 30th. I'm Todd Mathen. Here in Canada, it is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which is a stat holiday here. But I know it's probably not a stat where you are. So today, a special deep dive marketing science episode. We marketers make a lot of assumptions about people. The conservatives like big showy patriotism like flags and anthems. And progressives like anything to do with the environment. There you go. Problem solved. Now you have your creative. But what if we're missing a huge piece of this puzzle? User behavior. How people of different political leanings interact with the marketing tools that get us the sale. One of the biggest tools, of course, is search ads.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Is it possible that conservative buyers and liberal buyers think of and use our Google ads differently? That's what Alex Davidson set out to discover. He's the author of a research paper published last month in the Journal of Advertising called How Political Orientation Affects Trust in Search Advertising. He is an associate professor of marketing at Wayne State University in Detroit. He joins me now from his office in Montreal. Dr. Davidson, welcome. Yes. Hi, Todd. Thank you for having me here.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Thank you. So is this true? Does the way people think politically have a bearing on how they use search ads? Yeah, that's largely what I found in my research. So what I was studying, what I was interested in is what I define as search ad avoidance. And search ad avoidance is this deliberate or sometimes unconscious way that us as online users will avoid or bypass the sponsored advertisements that appear in search engine results pages. So you might have noticed that you've done this sometimes where you search for something on Google. And even though there's an ad that addresses what you're searching for, instead, you click on the organic link. You don't want to click on the ad. You might have had some friends that have done this.

Starting point is 00:02:10 I noticed this when I was searching for a barbecue brush not too long ago. And then I saw a web page from Home Depot that was being promoted as an ad. And then I saw that exact same web page in the organic section and I chose the organic one. And so I started thinking, what's going on here? Why are we doing this? And there's some research indicating that people's trust in advertising affects their willingness to engage with ads. And so I started wondering, okay, if people generally have a distrust in advertising, is there a way for marketers to identify groups that have higher levels of trust in advertising? And so I began to look at people's political orientation. So why is it that political

Starting point is 00:03:01 orientation would affect the way people react and engage and click on ads? Well, first, let's understand what political orientation is. So political orientation can be understood as the set of beliefs people have about the proper order and governance of society. I would argue that our political orientation is largely responsible for our core beliefs and values affecting what we do and don't trust. So we've seen increasing polarization over the last few decades, and our political orientation has come to affect nearly everything we do. You mentioned some of them at the beginning here, but it really does affect everything from where we live to what we read and watch to who

Starting point is 00:03:51 we're friends with and even who we want to have a relationship with. And in regards to the way that we process online information, it became clear to me that there should be a liberal-conservative divide in the trust towards sponsored versus organic communications. So compared to liberals, conservatives should be more likely to think that advertising plays a fair and just role within marketing. And is that because conservatives generally skew toward, you know, capitalism and the fair market itself is self-governing, and therefore it is the most pure form of fairness possible. Yeah, exactly. And this is something that research has shown over and over again. Conservatives do have more pro-business attitudes than liberals, whereas liberals have more pro-

Starting point is 00:04:41 government attitudes than conservatives. This is one of the biggest differences between both sides of the political spectrum. And so given that conservatives should consider advertising to be more fair and more just, you would assume that they would have higher levels of trust in advertising. Now, how you can sort of test that and extract that experimentally, that's where I started to think about interesting ways we can do that. And so the search engine results page, I think, is a wonderful way to test this theory because, pointing to my earlier example, it often presents the same website as a sponsored ad and as an organic link. So you have both options, right? And when presented with both options,

Starting point is 00:05:32 I expected for conservatives to be more likely than liberals to choose the search ad over the organic link. And that's exactly what I found. Even though the ad listings were identical between paid and organic. Yes, exactly. So I ran a few studies. In one of them, I looked at actual Google Analytics data and I compared the clicks towards a retail website. I looked at the difference between clicks coming from search ads versus organic links. So while I wasn't exactly sure how similar the search ad was to the organic link, I did find that the effect was there, right? That conservatives more than liberals would click the search ad over the organic link. But then I brought that into a more controlled setting where I ran a couple of experiments through online surveys. And there I was able to show people a search ad that looked identical as an organic link. And I,

Starting point is 00:06:42 you know, in the experiment, I identified which one is a search ad, which one is the organic link. And I, you know, in the experiment, I identified which one is a search ad, which one is the organic link. And again, you see the same result manifest. So it seemed pretty conclusive to me that conservatives, because of what we refer to as their system-justifying tendencies, not to get too technical, but because of their willingness to trust the marketplace, to perceive market-based activities as more fair and legitimate, they have these higher levels of trust in advertising, and that comes through really strongly within search engine marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

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Starting point is 00:08:18 Like, do you think there's been a change that much of a shift in American politics that it trickles down to the results marketers get? So that's a great question. Arguably, you could say that within conservatives or within liberals, you might see shifts over time, usually slight shifts, nothing too major. We know from research within U.S. politics that, by and large, conservatives tend to stay conservatives, liberals tend to stay liberals, and then there's those independents or undecided in the middle who usually are attracting the attention of politicians. Now, what's important when conducting the kind of research that I'm looking at is not so much whether these shifts occur, but whether in making comparisons between conservatives and liberals, we see large differences from one year to the next. And that's where we don't see a lot of significant

Starting point is 00:09:27 change. If anything, they become more polarized. So conservatives seem to rally more strongly around their ideology over time, and liberals do the same thing. So in my research, based on my theory, if what I'm saying is correct, that conservatives more than liberals tend to justify and perceive market-based systems and advertising as more fair, then that shouldn't dissipate. That, if anything, has only become stronger over time. And, you know, as marketers, we want people to click on our ads and probably a lot of organizations, brands, companies, one of their prime audiences are people who would vote liberal. Did any of your studies suggest ways to mitigate ad avoidance for audiences that are less receptive, like progressive, liberals, so Democrats? So I didn't introduce anything to manipulate people to act differently.

Starting point is 00:10:47 But what I also found within my research is that the way consumers search will affect how they process information, and it will affect whether or not they click on ads. So let me give you an example here. At the beginning of the customer journey, consumers tend to conduct what we call broad searches. So if I'm looking for a new laptop and I'm just beginning my customer journey, I'll go onto Google and I'll simply type in the word laptop

Starting point is 00:11:14 to begin my search. Now, perhaps a few weeks later, after I've done a lot of searching, I've done a lot of thinking about this and I'm closer to making a purchase in the later stage of my customer journey, I'm more likely to conduct a more specific narrow search. And now my search term might look something like laptop with 14-inch screen and 10-hour battery. So when we conduct these broader searches, such as laptop, we tend not to take the search process too seriously at this point. It's kind of like we're window shopping. We have this exploratory mindset. power, the fundamental parts of our personality and therefore our core beliefs and values

Starting point is 00:12:06 are going to shape how we process information. And so I expected that for broad searches specifically, we should find this effect where conservatives are more likely to click on search ads than liberals. And that's actually what I found. But for these narrower searches that happen later on in the customer journey, we do tend to take the search process more serious. So we are using more brainpower that enables more flexibility in our thinking. And so in those cases, our core beliefs and values are less influential compared to the

Starting point is 00:12:39 actual content of the information we're processing. In other words, for narrower searches, I did not expect to see any differences between conservatives and liberals in search ad clicks, and I didn't find any. So all this to say that offsetting search ad avoidance among more liberal-oriented consumers is likely to happen as they are further along in the customer journey. Your research focused on the U.S. Did you give any thought to how people in other countries might behave differently across the political spectrum? I absolutely have, and I have not conducted any research on that yet,

Starting point is 00:13:19 even though I am a Canadian, that is an area I would like to dip my toes in. But I am also interested in looking at differences in consumers' political orientations in countries and cultures that differ from the U.S., where the political spectrum doesn't align with the way it does for Americans. So I'm currently at the beginning stages of a research project that's going to explore the effects of political orientation on search ads in Japan to see if we see similar effects, if they materialize in the same way that they do in the U.S. But as of now, I can't answer that question just yet. Let me ask you a broad question, maybe unfair because you didn't study it specifically,

Starting point is 00:14:10 but just what does your gut say in terms of how political polarization will affect consumers' trust of digital advertising as a whole? There are no unfair questions. So everything is acceptable. But it's hard to say exactly how that will affect trust. Right now, what we see is a difference in that conservatives are more trusting and they tend to have these tendencies to want to, for lack of a better word, conserve and preserve the economic, market, and political systems that we currently live in. And so with that, we've seen lots of evidence that more liberal-oriented people are more oriented towards organic forms of promotion and marketing and content. And that seems to be the way the trend has been going for a while and will likely continue to go.

Starting point is 00:15:14 But there is no guarantees that that will continue indefinitely. And like we've seen in the past with the relationship between, for example, political ideology and political party preference, those two have not been consistent over time, right? So not that long ago, the Republican Party was the party of the more progressive branch of the U.S. electorate. So yeah, things can definitely change. And there's been no shortage of surprises in the last few years when it comes to politics. But I don't expect anything like that to change. When we talk about trust in digital advertising, I don't expect much change in the near future. How can we exploit this as marketers? What's the bottom line? What should we be doing as marketers

Starting point is 00:16:12 to change the way we use Google ads or other search engine ads to take advantage of this knowledge that you're bringing us? I think this research highlights an issue that marketers might have not been fully aware of, and bringing it to light can help them better prepare for their campaigns, for their strategies. So, for example, if they are targeting more liberal-oriented marketplaces, and I have ways that that can be identified in my research. If they are doing that and they're realizing maybe they're not getting as high of a click-through rate as they'd like, perhaps they're not converting in a way that they would expect. This research is in place to say, okay, there could be a reason and that reason could be

Starting point is 00:17:03 that that marketplace simply does not trust your ads as much as your organic links. So what can you do in that situation? Well, one idea is don't abandon your SEO strategy, your search engine optimization strategy. Don't take your foot off the pedal. You want to maintain and perhaps even enhance your SEO efforts in that particular situation, and especially for liberal-oriented consumers at the beginning stages of their customer journey. Another thing that they might want to consider, and my research is going to pursue as it continues is the effect of things like trust symbols in search ads. related to ratings, by having information related to endorsing the product from legitimate

Starting point is 00:18:09 recognized individuals, or perhaps just having trust symbols that say that a certain business has a certain level of accreditation or that it's been certified or it has a guarantee. By enhancing trust, arguably, we should see that even among those marketplaces that have more distrust in advertising, hopefully marketers can sort of recoup and take advantage and make sure they don't lose out on those marketplaces. That is something I'm going to look at in my research, and it's something I encourage digital marketers to examine as well. Well, your paper is fascinating. And I want to thank you for taking a moment to share it with us. Yeah, thank you so much. This has been great. I really appreciate it. Alex Davidson is an associate professor of marketing at Wayne State University in Detroit

Starting point is 00:18:59 and is the author of Countering Search Ad Avoidance, How Political Orientation Affects Trust in Search Advertising. We have a link to his paper in the show notes.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Politics of Search

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