Looking for Mobile Love? Here are the Top Mobile Users in Dating Apps Today

By Ariel Neidermeier (Director of Marketing @Motive)

In celebration of Valentine’s Day this week we’ve been thinking about ways mobile marketers can engage the 15% of U.S. adults who have used mobile dating apps to connect with potential partners.

Harnessing the power of the dating apps can be a powerful medium for marketers looking to engage high-quality users. The Match Group is the world’s leading provider of dating products and owns dating app heavyweights like Tinder and Match as well as well-known brands like PlentyOfFish and OkCupid. Of the Match Group’s 59 million monthly active users, 8.1 million represent paid members. That means over 86% of Match Group’s user base will be exposed to mobile ads as they use the free versions of their platforms. With such a staggering number of potential impressions, advertising in dating apps presents an incredible opportunity for mobile marketers. We studied data from the world’s top dating apps to give you a round up of the users in dating apps today and how to engage them:

  • Women spend more time in dating apps

Tinder, the world’s largest dating app, processes over 1.6 billion swipes and 12 million matches per day globally. That’s a staggering amount of activity for a single app, but it makes sense given Tinder’s usage stats. Tinder users are not only active but highly engaged: users average about 90 minutes a day in the app with the average user opening the app around 11 times a day. Of these users, women spend more time in-app than men: in a single session, women spend as much as 8.5 minutes swiping ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to potential partners and men about 7.2 minutes.

What this means for marketers: Optimise your ads to appeal to women and use precision targeting to serve them at key moments as they’re swiping.

  • Millennials and Generation Z represent the fastest-growing age groups on dating apps

The highest engagers in dating apps are 18- to 24-year-olds – also known as the Millennial generation – and the number of these users continues to grow rapidly. Between 2013 and 2015, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who use online dating services roughly tripled from 10% to 27%. Another rapidly-growing age group in dating apps are 55- to 64-year-olds who represent about 12% of dating app users. As the largest and fastest-growing age groups using dating apps to connect with other people, Millennials and Generation Z individuals represent a valuable opportunity for marketers.

What this means for marketers: Optimize the messaging of your ads to appeal to Millennials. As a generation that places greater value on spending their money on experiences rather than products, how can your brand effectively communicate the value of your app to compliment their lifestyles?

  • To target people in certain regions, find the right app

The geographical distribution of mobile dating app users is largely dependent on the specific app. While Match shows a majority of users in the southern region of the U.S., Coffee Meets Bagel veers towards a higher proportion of users in the western region of the country. Interestingly, Tinder usage seems to be relatively evenly distributed across the country relative to other dating apps.

What this means for marketers: Identify your target audience, where they are located and build your media buying strategy to reflect that geographical distribution. For example, if you’re looking to target users on the west coast and east coast, buy more in Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel.

Source: SurveyMonkey Intelligence

Ariel Neidermeier

Director of Marketing

Ariel is the Director of Marketing at Motive. She is a proud graduate of UC San Diego where she studied International Business and Economics. Her passions include yoga, travel and taking care of her ever-growing collection of plants.