People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

At least, not according to Facebook data

Using Facebook’s Audience Insights tool (free to anyone who buys Facebook ads), I compared people from San Francisco and Palo Alto/Mountain View to those in New York City, Boulder/Denver and the nation as a whole.

In short, San Francisco / Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads…

San Francisco, California Activity Profile (Source: Facebook)

[Update: My latest post — 14% of global users are blocking ads in 2016]

The average user in the United States has a value of 12 for “Ads Clicked” whereas a San Francisco user has only clicked 1 ad. Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently as the median national user. The story is very similar for the Mountain View / Palo Alto audience.

Palo Alto, CA and Mountain View, CA (Source: Facebook)

Those medians for the 150–200 million monthly US users:

Source: Facebook (United States users)

This means SF/SV people are 12 times less likely to click on ads, and 1/3rd as likely to “like” a page, 1/7th as likely to comment, 1/8th as likely to like a post, and half as likely to share a post (compared to the median national user).

Here’s the other cities I mentioned, for comparison’s sake:

Boulder, Colorado (Source: Facebook)

New York, NY (Source: Facebook)