How Much AdWords Traffic Can You Get From NI/UK/IRL?

I wrote about this in a post from *ages* ago here :-

www.ppcni.com/traffic-uk-regions-republic-ireland/1732/

Here is some updated information on the sort of levels of traffic you could expect from Northern Ireland v Ireland v UK…

From Google :-

Reach is an estimate of how many people in a location could see your ads.

How it’s calculated: Your estimated reach may differ from census data, because reach calculates the number of unique cookies from people visiting Google sites. Reach also varies due to the number of devices or browsers per person, length of activity and number of temporary visitors to a location.

How to use it: The reach estimate should only be used to compare location targets. To estimate the number of ad impressions, try the Keyword Planner.

 

According to the 2011 census, population estimates for the regions (or countries if you prefer to call them that) are:

Estimated populations of the four constituent countries of the UK are 53 million people in England, 5.3 million in Scotland, 3.1 million in Wales and 1.8 million in Northern Ireland.

This means that NI should make up 2.85% of the UK population.

To keep this simple, let’s do the following:

  1. Ignore weird people like me who use more than one browser per device.
  2. Assume that people in Great Britain have on average, the same number of internet enabled devices as people in Northern Ireland.
  3. Assume that the ratio of internet users who regularly visit Google sites is the same for GB & NI.

Google reckons that the population of NI is 2.14% of the UK total.

This means that Google underestimates the Northern Ireland population by  25%*

At least part of this figure can be explained by BT incorrectly indicating that lots of people in NI are actually in Scotland, and every IP address I have ever had (with Virgin, Plusnet, and Three) has been an English one.

In theory this should improve as more people use mobile devices and share their location with Google and stay signed in to their Google accounts. But that’s a small comfort to businesses who want to be able to target the population of Northern Ireland Reliably right now.

*Roughly.

PS – for the Republic of Ireland you are currently looking at being able to target approx 4.4 times as many people as you can target in Northern Ireland.

 

 

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