Psychological Targeting To Get More Clicks and Conversions for Your Online Store

Grow Your Shopify Store, Agency or App

Recent research shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets. Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences. We discuss both the potential benefits of this method for helping individuals make better decisions and the potential pitfalls related to manipulation and privacy.
Michal is a Professor at Stanford University. He studies humans in a digital environment using cutting-edge computational methods, AI and Big Data. He has co-authored Modern Psychometrics (a popular textbook) and published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals including Nature Scientific Reports, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Machine Learning, that have been cited over 15,000 times. He is among the Top 1% of the Highly Cited Researchers according to Clarivate. His research inspired a cover of The Economist, a 2014 theatre play “Privacy”, multiple TED talks, a video game, and was discussed in thousands of books, press articles, podcasts, and documentaries. Michal was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica. His research exposed the privacy risks that they have exploited and measured the efficiency of their methods. He holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cambridge and master's degrees in psychometrics and in social psychology. He used to work as a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford's Computer Science Department, the Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, and a researcher at Microsoft Research (Machine Learning Group).
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