Top Websites in Ireland – December 2009

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 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.