Sarah from infolinks.com sent me over this exclusive report (I feel famous!) with some interesting statistics they've discovered. From a sample of 50 million impressions across 25,000 publishers they found that kiwis clicked their ads 36% more often than US residents. New Zealand being the country that had a highest click through rate than any of the other English speaking countries.
For those that don't know... infolinks are those contextual ads that you've probably seen when browsing websites. They take words from blog posts and other publishers and link them to relevant ads in their network. For example if I wrote "search engine optimization" in my blog post it might pop up a little ad for a search engine optimization firm when you hovered over it and then you could click through to their website.
Anyway... the breakdown of the different countries is as follows:
Now I find this interesting for a number of reasons. The obvious one is if you are a NZ content publisher you're going to make more money from having contextual advertising like infolinks on your website. This is because you are paid by the number of clicks you receive on the ads on your website.
But it's also interesting to ask the question why New Zealand has higher click through rates in the first place? I'm sure there's a bias because we're exposed to less ads of this type than the US and other countries with larger populations. However is that all it is... just because it's more unique here?
My other thought is that kiwis might be more trusting of advertising (and also inundated with less of it). That's why we're more willing to click and see what the advertiser has to say. I'd be interested to know whether Google Adwords would produce similar results for their ad network as well.
Ignoring my speculation the fact remains than kiwis are more likely to click on contextual ads that are relevant to what they're interested in. For whatever reason this may be a great way for you to reach the local market. Or if you have a lot of traffic this might be another revenue stream for your website as well.
Thanks to Sarah and the infolinks team for the exclusive and you can download the full report here (right click and "save target as...").
That’s good news and very encouraging for kiwi affiliate marketers. I live in a country town in South East Queensland, but still love keeping in contact with NZ, Craigs emails are one of the ways I can get my Auckland buzz, (thanks Craig), and businesses over here still pay by cheques and send faxes!
Thanks for the kind words Helen… happy to give you your Auckland buzz and I hope you learn some cool stuff as well!
Feel free to drop me an email and let me know what you’re up to with your site/s.
Craig