How Business Men and Women Differ in Their Actions Online

Time flies. Especially recently I have noticed it going even faster than usual, and it is painfully clear when looking at how I have been neglecting this blog for quite some time already. To start off again, I will post something I actually already wrote ages ago, but that I hope is still of interest. I promise to be better with regards to keeping you all updated on a more regular basis from now on about women, games, marketing and in general the happenings in our ever more gamified wild world and web.

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When it comes to online ads and the upper levels of the professional world, men and women interact very differently, and if we are to believe a study by online ad targeting company Bizo, women tend to click while men tend to act on them.

The study was done between January and July (2010) and included a survey of over 80 million business professionals.  In addition to the above mentioned finding, the study also showed that both genders tend to interact with online ads at vastly differing times of the day and night.

Women apparently deliver a 23% higher clickthrough rate than men, while men are 53% more likely to actually buy, start a free trial, download or complete another action related to the ad than would their female counterparts. Interestingly enough, guys tend to click at at 3:00 a.m (EST) while women are more likely to click at 5 a.m. In contrast to this, it takes men until 4:00pm to be most likely to act while women act sooner, already at 11:00 a.m. Obviously, these times are slightly skewed based on different timezones and are only indications, but they seem to show an interesting difference in how we act online depending on our gender.

But gender isnt the only thing that matters when it comes to who clicks and when, just like Rebecca Lieb lays out in her blog entry on eConsultancy. Job Roles and industries also show an affect on people, with people working in publishing, accounting, drug stores/pharmacies, veterinary services and agriculture serving up the most clicks. The least-likely to click work in car rental, aerospace and defense manufacturing, media/music, boats and marine manufacturing and higher education.

Interestingly enough, the people most inclined to act on advertised offers work in business services, media/internet, hospitality, advertising/marketing, industries that have a lot of contact with this format of communication. Least likely to act are again the professionals in car rental, aerospace and defense manufacturing, but also those in weight/health management, construction/residential building and graphic design.

Top clickers are employed in the following roles: operations change management, IT database, government sales support and operations compliance. The most actions are taken by C-level executives, IT, Marketing, medical/health and advertising professionals.

So, where do you fit in? And are you a "stereotypical" male or female clicker?