Facebook's Revenues: A Fool's Game
While researching Facebook's metrics over time, I stumbled upon two data sets that, together, confirmed a hunch I'd had, namely that Facebook ad CTR and intelligence are inversely correlated. The scatter graph below shows Facebook ad CTR by state (X axis, data from WebTrends*) and state smartness (Y axis, data from the Morgan Quitno State & City Ranking Press).
X-axis: Facebook Ad CTR Rank (1 is highest CTR, 50 is lowest CTR) Y-axis: State smartness rank (1 is smartess, 50 is least smart)
Highlights:
- States in the top 50% of Facebook ad CTR have rank 32.6 in 'smartness' vs. 18.36 for the bottom 50% of ad CTR states.
- States in the top 20% of ad CR rank only nominally lower in smartness (33.8) than the top 50% (32.6), but the bottom 20% in ad CTR are significantly smarter (14.8) than the bottom 50% as a whole (18.4).
- Hawaiians might not be the smartest (#42), but unlike their unsmart peers, they rarely click on ads (dead last in ad CTR). But then again, if you're living in Hawaii, what more do you need?
It is of course worth noting that the Morgan Quitno state ranking methodology is merely a proxy for the relative smarts of people in various states, but I do think it's sound enough to prove that Facebook ad CTR and user intelligence are most probably inversely correlated.
Now, if I could just get my hands on some by-state Google CTR data. Anybody?
Source: Facebook Advertising Performance Benchmarks & Insights Whitepaper from Webtrends, published January 2011.
