Mobile Ad Response Seen Differing by Gender, Platform

August 22, 2014

This article is included in these additional categories:

Boomers & Older | Digital | Media & Entertainment | Men | Mobile Phone | Social Media | Sports | Tablet | Videogames | Women | Youth & Gen X

BurstMedia-Mobile-Ad-Response-by-Gender-Aug2014Men respond more to ads in mobile browsers, while women are more likely to swipe or click on in-app ads, finds a new study [pdf] from Burst Media. The study – based on a survey of close to 750 US online adults who use a mobile device to access the mobile web and/or applications – finds that some 28% of male respondents claim to tap or swipe on mobile browser ads either sometimes or all the time, compared to 19% of women. The gap is narrower when it comes to in-app ads, though.

Women responding to the survey were more likely to say they frequently swipe or tap on in-app ads, with 22% professing to doing so sometimes or all the time. As such, women appear to be more slightly likely to respond to in-app ads than to browser ads. By comparison, 18% of men said they frequently swipe or tap in-app ads, a significantly smaller proportion than claimed to frequently respond to browser ads.

Delving further into differences by age, gender, and device, the report notes that:

  • Primary tablet users are considerably more likely than primary smartphone users to frequently swipe or tap on in-app ads (26% and 17%, respectively), though this gap effectively disappears when it comes to ads within a browser (25% and 23%, respectively);
  • Females aged 55 and older (36%) are especially likely to be found frequently responding to in-app ads;
  • Men in the 18-34 (26%) and 35-54 (32%) brackets are almost twice as likely as women in those age groups (15% and 17%, respectively) to frequently tap or swipe on ads seen in mobile browsers; while
  • Among the 55+ group, women (28%) are more likely than men (24%) to frequently swipe or tap on browser ads.

The survey also finds some other gender-related gaps in mobile preferences, with women more likely to count social media, weather and gaming apps as among their most-used and men more likely to turn to news, music and sports apps.

Interestingly, respondents were twice as likely to say they spend all or most of their mobile time in a browser (33.4%) than to say they spend most or all with apps (15.8%). That’s despite recent data indicating that mobile apps now account for a majority of digital time spent in the US, far outweighing time spent with the mobile web. It’s possible that survey respondents visit more mobile websites than apps, while spending more time in apps; after all, research suggests that Americans spend more time with the Facebook app than they do with the entire mobile web.

Generally speaking, per the Burst Media survey, women spend more time than men using their mobile devices to access the web and/or applications, as three-quarters of women (versus 6 in 10 men) spend at least one hour on a typical day doing so.

About the Data: The survey was fielded during the first 3 weeks of June.

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