How Political Orientation Affects Trust in Search Advertising

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 issue.

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.

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.

Thank you for having me here.

How Politics Affects Search Ad Trust

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. I noticed this when I was searching for a barbecue brush not too long ago. And then I saw a webpage from Home Depot that was being promoted as an ad. And then I saw that exact same webpage 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, 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.

Why, though? Why does political orientation 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 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.

The Political Divide

Is that because conservatives generally skew toward 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-government attitudes than conservatives. This is one of the biggest differences between both sides of the political spectrum.

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? 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 in the experiment, I identified which one is the search ad, which one is the organic link, and again, you see the same result manifest.

Is Today’s Political Chaos Skewing Results?

You did four experiments. One was based on polling data of where Americans saw their political leanings, and then you matched that up with clicks. But that data came from polls in 2018. Since 2018, a lot has happened in the US… How do you think your results would be different if you'd used more recent polling data?

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 US politics that by and large, conservatives tend to stay conservative, liberals tend to stay liberals.

Can We Mitigate This Effect?

And as marketers, we want people to click on our ads. 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. 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.

Are Other Countries Affected Too?

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, 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.

The Future of Digital Advertising and Trust

Let me ask you a broad question… 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.

How Marketers Should Change

How can we exploit this as marketers? What's the bottom line? What should we be doing as marketers 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.

Wrap-Up

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 and is the author of Countering Search Ad Avoidance: How Political Orientation Affects Trust in Search Advertising.

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