A study that the RimmKaufman Group began in early August set out to find out if certain regions and specific zip codes play significant roles in paid search conversions.

The thinking was that lowpopulation areas with fewer brick and mortar stores are usually more successful for catalogs, so perhaps the same would be true with paid search. The RimmKaufman Group took IP address and zip code information from Digital Element, and used it to tie 3 million PPC clicks to their zip codes for one data set, and nearly 2 million clickthroughs for the other. We then tied each zip code to census data we purchased which provided information about the location, average household income, population, land area, average age, average home value, number of business addresses, number of residential addresses, etc. says George Michie of the Rimm Kaufman Group.