How Much Traffic Can you Get From The Different UK Regions (And The Republic Of Ireland)?

This used to be a difficult questions to answer, particularly for N.Ireland business.
You could use the AdWords traffic estimator, but when selecting ‘Northern Ireland’, you would often end up with zero clicks a day which wasn’t very helpful at all.

In a previous post on AdWords Geo Targeting, with a few un-scientific observations, I reckoned that Northern Ireland had a reach of around 0.66% of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales).

Well we have to guess no more – as Google have finally given us ‘reach’ values when you are selecting which areas to target for your campaign.

Here are the UK regions (and Eire) :-

According to these figures, Northern Ireland currently has approximately 1.04% of the reach of Great Britain.

They also say :

Reach is an estimate of the audience in a location target, based on unique cookies. The reach estimate may differ significantly from census population data, because it is based on the number of users seen on Google properties. In addition, the reach estimate varies due to a range of factors, including the number of devices or browsers per user, the number of outside visitors to the selected location and the length of user activity.

This reach estimate should only be used as general guidance for determining the relative number of users in a location target, as compared with other location targets. To estimate the total number of impressions for your ads, try Traffic Estimator and DoubleClick Ad Planner.

So this is not intended to be a very accurate view of how many unique users there are, but it certainly, at the very least gives you a very good idea about the relative amount of traffic you can get from different geographical areas.

Or does it…..?

Here are the estimates for the whole of Northern Ireland, and for Belfast in Northern Ireland :-

Doh! It says that you can get about a third more traffic by targeting Belfast rather than the whole of Northern Ireland. There is something very wrong with that…

*Update* (25th January 2012)

Someone from Google has obviously been reading this post, and adjusted the figures for Northern Ireland and Belfast :-

One thought on “How Much Traffic Can you Get From The Different UK Regions (And The Republic Of Ireland)?

  1. The problem is at BT’s door. They route IPs around the UK, so people from NI may appear as being in London, Edinburgh, Wrexham etc. Google try to work out where the user is with varying degrees of success…

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