Men Cost Less to Reach With Facebook Ads, Click More

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Women outnumber men on Facebook, yet marketers spend more targeting men, allocating 53 percent of their budget to male users. Why is that?

Quite simply, men are cheap. So say Kenshoo Social and Resolution Media in their latest Social Media Insights report, Men Are Cheap: Efficient Gender Targeting with Facebook Ads.

Despite the fact that 58 percent of Facebook users are women, advertisers allocate only 47 percent of their budget to targeting women. Men also account for more click volume, though this can be at least partly explained by the higher impression volume as a result of greater spend.

Other factors are in play, too, though. It’s also cheaper to target men than women; the average CPM for men is $0.16, compared to $0.20 to for women. Looking at costs-per-click, the disparity grows: $0.51 per click for men and $0.68 for women.

As a result, marketers can afford to reach more men and get greater exposure with their budget.

Kenshoo and Resolution offer a few tips to make the most of these insights in gender targeting on Facebook:

• Segment your audience and create highly targeted ads.
• Expand highly-targeted ad segments by extending improved relevance and performance to larger audiences.
• Use custom text and images for male and female audiences.
• Adjust bidding strategy with segment attributes, including gender, in mind.
• Monitor frequency - they recommend a frequency of 6.

Kenshoo also released data recently that showed their Social clients grew ad spend on Facebook by 36 percent over the first half of 2012, while Enterprise and Local clients grew paid search ad budgets by 12 percent.

The full Men Are Cheap report is available to download from Kenshoo and examined aggregate data from nearly 65 billion Facebook ad impressions and 20 million Facebook ad clicks during a 12-month period.

This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.