Barry Hand

I’ve men­tioned Google’s Ad Plan­ner before, debat­ing the use­ful­ness of it on Irish data.

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 Eir​com​.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 xtend​me​dia​.com & medi​aplex​.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 — portablenorth​pole​.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.