We at IPA have recently been delving into the world of online advertising to help us spread the gospel of rigorous impact research.  Being who we are, we could not resist this opportunity to run a field experiment.  We designed one that would help us optimize our advertising strategy while also settling an important score: which academic institution's rep pulls the most weight in cyberspace? Our ad was simple:

Poverty Research

Breakthroughs to Fight Poverty

By [randomized] Researchers

Inside the brackets in the third line, Google ads then randomly inserted one of nine university names, one of three acronyms (IPA, JPAL, or FAI) , one of three "impostor" acronyms (ITA, GTAM, and MAI) that were phonetically similar to the real acronyms, or one of three generic words (university, top, and academic).

Needless to say, we got some interesting results.  Surprisingly, Nobel factory UChicago fared the worst among all university brand names that we tested.  Interestingly, albeit we will admit this was not our prior intended subsample analysis, turns out that the cities of New York and Chicago were both the laggards in this race; NYU, Columbia, Northwestern, and UChicago had the lowest response rates among universities tested.  The top ones were Dartmouth, MIT, Yale and Harvard, in order.

As you can see, generic keywords "university," "top" and "academic," were significantly more effective than the ones naming schools or organizations.

Stay tuned!  In Part II, we'll post the tables from these and another interesting regression...