I asked last night from twitter for some estimates and most replies were in the 40,000-50,000 mark.

My estimate is 150,000 and here’s why…

Following on from from my post on Irish website usage, I’ve drilled down a little further to see how accurate or not the Google Ad Planner data is and to see if there’s any insight into how many users from Ireland twitter has.

Damien Mulley found stats that Ireland counts for 0.52% of total Twitter users, putting us 17th in the world. Although the report calculated location with “proprietary technology to infer geography based on user disclosed information which does not rely on Twitter’s geo-location API.” and may not be as useful as it appears, but it’s a good starting point and with the lack of anything else, let’s run with it.

The stats taken from Google Ad Planner show 200k Unique Visitors (UV) from Ireland in December, which is 6.9% reach of total web users (2.9M) – generating a mammoth 15M page views. Again from Ad Planner, taking the total twitter.com unique visitors and Irish specific traffic, we see around 0.27% of all twitter.com traffic originating from Ireland.

Of that 200k UV, you could assume that the total number of Irish twitter users to be as high as 400k because more than half of all users (55 percent) use a Twitter app, but I doubt if we’re looking at such a huge amount and the Ad Planner data covers the UV for the full month and I’d expect that users would use the web interface occasionally throughout a month.

So calculating total Irish twitter users is proving a little tricky, mainly due to Twitter not publishing total account numbers.The estimated twitter usage is at 18 mllion in the US, Interestingly Ad Planner shows 19 million UV from the US during December 2009. Again using the Sysomos report, the US contributed 50.88% of total twitter users. So assuming total twitter accounts in the 36 million region – would it be fair to say that Ireland has 184,000 users?

Let’s hit up Google for some more stats – this time using some search strings to see is “Ireland” indexed in users bio’s which returns 128,00 results, although I’m not convinced of that relevance as the page listings end after about 900 results, something discussed at We are Social’s blog.

Time to go back and look at the initial 200k figure, this time using Google Trends for a daily breakdown. The profile below ties in with what I would expect a 200k monthly UV website to look like, running between 30-40k daily uniques.

Twitter.com usage during December 2009

And looking further back to see where we are in terms of growth, which is pretty steady from the start the year peaking in early June.

Twitter.com usage over last 12 months

So being fairly confident of the traffic stats from Google which ties in with the research from Sysomos, I’m going to estimate that there are 150,000 Irish twitter accounts, by comparison there are over 1.2M Facebook users in Ireland (source: Facebook advertising)

While the twitter.com website has 200k estimated UV from Ireland, I’m also considering that there is a duplication in that number. Also visitor numbers would never be equal to accounts as some of that may be search traffic as twitter status’s are now included in Google search results.

So am I over-estimating usage? or does the dormant accounts dwarf the active users resulting in skewed numbers, but that’s a whole other story, until then I’m going to run with 150,000

The lack of any meaningful competitive intelligence for Irish web usage has led me to delve a little closer into what the Ad Planner data can do. For a more robust method, I use a mixture of tools but still think that without a Hitwise equivalent, Google is the best source for figures – regardless if they are not accurate, they are at least will be consistently inaccuate

So first off, How does Ad Planner collect data?

Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.

In addition, Google Ad Planner only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.

So let’s break it down, and see where exactly they’re pulling this from.

1. Aggregated Google search data: This can include a number of sources, but I’m guessing it’s mainly from Google.ie and probably also websites like Eircom.net (enhanced by Google search).

2. Opt-in Google Analytics: Unlikely to gain a huge amount from this, Most GA users I’ve spoke to have this disabled, probably an Irish thing of not wanting your neighbour to know what you’re doing.

3. Opt-in external consumer panel data: No idea what this would be, can’t see it being huge – possibly similar to the method Comescore use to collect data

4. other third-party market research: Which could be: Search, Reader, Feedburner, Adwords, Adsense, Checkout, Desktop, Earth, iGoogle, Maps, Toolbar, Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Orkut and anything Google can collect.

Data collected on Irish web usage

So, with the data collection being more comprehensive than anything else available here in Ireland, I’ve manipulated the tool to show all websites and dumped as much of what was available for December, which includes…

• 4548 websites
• 2.9 Million Unique visitors
• 4.4 Billion pages viewed
• 99.4% Country reach (of total Internet users)

Top 10 Websites

(View all websites)

One thing to bear in mind when looking through the list, is that the Ad Planner tool is developed to help assist in selecting websites to advertise on, so the list throws up some anomalies such as no Google.ie (obviously), as well as some questions regarding the high usage of websites like live.com, yahoo.com microsoft.com & mozilla.com. I would consider these to be an amalgamation of the services they provide (including sub domains) and probably not users access the website directly, same goes for xtendmedia.com & mediaplex.com.

It’s no surprise to see Facebook absolutely hammering any other website, with 1.5m UV and 52% reach, in comparison bebo.com with 560K UV and 19.6% reach.

To get into the top 100, you’ll need more than 74,000 Unique visitors for the month – and it’s good to see websites like boards.ie & donedeal.ie making the list and with it being December – portablenorthpole.tv & met.ie have peak traffic as well.

Feel free to filter and play with the data here on Google Tables, One of the cool things you can quickly do, is filter all .ie websites as well filter for your own or competitor websites. I’ve left in all the Ad Planner data including the categories which might be of some use.

I’ll be following up with some extra insight on this over the next few days.

A post by Brendan Hughes had me thinking a little more in depth on Google AdPlanner (you can read my comments there and also a previous post) and the benefits it can have for publishers.

A few years ago, I got fairly interested in making money from Google Adsense – but got short on time and disinterested in taking earnings to the next level (or any level above $5/day)

Right now I only monetize one website – Wiffy.ie which is a discussion forum I set up around 3 years ago for Nintendo users in Ireland. Onsite advertising includes Google Adsense and referrals from a video game supplier. Originally I also ran affiliate network ads – but found these time consuming to see any decent return.

As of today, Wiffy has netted over $2,000 from Adsense, over 3million ad impressions, and almost 12,000 clicks – not a huge amount considering the website is a hobby – but more than enough to pay for hosting, domain and software costs.

Something which has interested me, and I’ve touched on Google AdPlanner before – is the ability to target websites from an advertisers point of view. But what about publishers, those webmasters who want to generate revenue from their traffic.

What Google allows publishers to do is provide their own advertising information, check out Wiffy’s here

You can see the little Google Analytics icon, where I’ve shared my data to give actual figures. This is really useful for an advertiser as they get to see actual data. Ad Planner also allows the publisher to include information on ad formats and placements as well, effectively building a website media pack for potential advertisers.

And you don’t even need to be on Google’s AdSense network, you can update your data even if you don’t serve Google Ads!

This is pretty cool, considering similar ideas are being sold commercially – like Blue Metrix.

So for webmasters looking to increase revenue, Ad Planner could be a quick an easy way to put your website in the shop front. You can also link to an advertising page on site with additional details. I would definitely take more notice of a website which has updated info and is sharing some traffic stats. The lack of network centric data (sfor demographic targeting) makes it not-as-useful for Ireland, but as an advertiser I’ve already used the tool to target audiences and I’m pretty happy with results so far.

A research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

Comscore rival?

So is it a rival for Comscore or Omniture?, I’ve found that in some (not all) cases the data is quite similar, as the data covers not only AdSense websites – it can be used for research purposes.

Data comes from Google Search, Google Analytics, “opt-in external consumer panel data” and “other third-party market research.”, which could be: Search, Reader, Feedburner, Adwords, Adsense, Checkout, Desktop, Earth, iGoogle, Maps, Toolbar, Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Orkut and more, so not exactly fluffy stats.

Show me some figures

A quick overview shows 2.6m UV (Unique Visitors) in Ireland, last time I was research internet usage in Ireland (2007/08) it was around 2.1m – so this figure isn’t too far off and is a good indicator.
What’s interesting is the accuracy of some of the statistics, comparing it to both my Comscore and Omniture data, it matched up quite well, although the figure of UV’s for Boards.ie in Ad Planner is 240k (based on 30days) while that figure has got to be much higher – as noted in ABC audit figure of 1.7m.

Refining your research allows you to drill down by County (not great for non cities) as well as language.

Targeting that Polish Cork sweetspot

Here’s a quick view if I wanted to target Polish visitors in Cork, this example quickly shows the level of targeting available with only two filters applied.

You can also define an audience, breaking it down by websites that your target audience visit, again zoning in on your target audience.

You can also break it down further based on websites visited and keywords searched for.

Ok, do something useful with this data

Once you’ve filtered down to the websites that match your criteria, you can export the list of websites for use in Google AdWords – and from there setup your placement ads to fit. For example – my chosen criteria allows me to target 78K UV’s across 8 websites.

Ireland get’s raw deal?

Yup, as the data size can run quite low when you apply a few filters, this message is quite common.

Meanwhile the level of targetting available in other countries also includes really useful (but probably not accurate) info like the below.

Missing out this key filter on demographics, makes a possibly really useful application – only somewhat useful. This additional set of information would put it in line with what’s available from other pay per click networks such as Facebook.

Summary

Ad Planner is essentially a tool to increase usage of the AdWords Content Network, and for the most part it is useful, especially as a research tool – and is good to quickly crunch some figures for websites – especially as it makes use of Google’s vast network of data.

More insights on Google Ad Planner

• Google Ad Planner review on SEOChat
• Competitive Intelligence Analytis by Avinash Kaushik
• Is Google Ad Planner Getting Its Data from Google Toolbar on TechCrunch
• Google Ad Planner v Comscore Data