Candy? Flowers? Mobile phone analytics?
For Valentine’s Day 2013, the data analysts at Seattle’s Marchex Institute have released a study that analyzed more than 200,000 phone calls placed to U.S. businesses in the past year to uncover how the sexes behave with phone calls…and mobile advertising. The findings were released on Valentine’s Day, when gender-based expectations take center stage. How do the sexes behave when it comes to using the telephone for business?
The results tend to defy the gender myths about men, women and the telephone as a business tool? The data reveals some surprising truths.
Men actually spend 13 percent more time on the phone. And they’re more talkative than women. On average, male callers stayed on the phone for 7 minutes 23 seconds and women for just 6 minutes 30 seconds.
The study also found that men speak more and speak faster than women. The average male caller spoke 236 words per call at 32 words per minute and the average female spoke 227 words per call at a rate of 24 words per minute.
“All of us carry around ingrained gender biases whether we realize it or not,” said Eric Taylor, senior analyst at the Marchex Institute, a research and analytics team that publishes findings on mobile advertising and the digital call industry. “But these biases can and do impact business. That’s why it’s valuable to look behind the curtain of what you think is true and discover what’s really there.”
The vast majority of calls came through mobile phones. These calls were driven across the spectrum of mobile advertising channels, including click-to-call, voice search, mobile directories and mobile display. Analysts then used Marchex Call Mining software, which scans for key words and voice tonalities, to aggregate anonymous data points.
Taylor and his Institute colleagues examined call data to 11 different industries, from nutrition to auto repair to pest control. They found, for instance, that more men call pest control for mice removal but females generated 59% of roach calls, 58% of those for spiders and 56% regarding termites.
The data also showed that men tend to make more calls at the beginning of the day whereas females prefer to make more calls after lunch. Recognizing such patterns, Taylor said, gives business owners a huge advantage in boosting customer conversions.
“This gets you thinking more deeply about questions such as, ‘How should I structure my campaigns? Should I change my targeting methodology?'” Taylor said. “Understanding human behavior is game-changing knowledge.”
Marchex supports its customers through a unique technology platform that has three primary components: (1) Call Analytics, which powers all of our advertising solutions, and allows partners to leverage data and insights that accurately measure the performance of 
mobile, online and offline call advertising; (2) Digital Call Marketplace, which annually connects millions of consumer calls to our advertisers from a range of mobile and online sources on a Pay For Call basis; and (3) Local Leads, a white-labeled, full-service digital advertising solution for small business resellers that drives quality phone calls and other leads to their small business advertisers.
Read more about “Men, Women and their Relationship with Phone Calls” online. [24×7]
