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Middle East and North Africa internet reality researched
2011-02-07
MENA Ipsos/Gemius Audience study implementation – the first step to a pan-regional panel and complex online measurement for the region.
In December 2010, the initial Ipsos/Gemius Audience results for two of the MENA region countries were published. The dynamically developing Gemius flagship study is intended to cover the whole Middle East/North Africa region. The research, which is presently being implemented in seventeen MENA countries, will provide a thorough insight into current trends and changes on the local internet market.
The flagship study of Gemius, gemiusAudience, known in MENA as Ipsos/Gemius Audience, has been launched in cooperation with Ipsos MENA, a leading research company in the region. The study is currently being implemented on the markets of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, Libya and the Palestinian Territories. At present, the recruitment of panellists to so-called cookie panels, the study base, is taking place in these countries. This means that all publishers who are participating in the research are able to see their own results in the web analytics tools. Additionally the rankings of the top websites are published step by step country-to-country (gemiusAudience). The two first countries for which the data for all researched websites can already be compared, contrasted and analysed in the media planning tool, not only by media owners but also by media agencies, are Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The introduction of the software panel, which offers an overview of the whole online market, also including sites which are not participating in the research, is planned for the second quarter of 2011.
The distinguishing quality of the study in this region is the fact that although users from all the above mentioned countries speak the same language and use many common web sites, the panels are independently recruited for each of the markets. The results obtained from gemiusAudience will be presented in two ways: separately for each of the studied countries as well as jointly for the whole region. In both cases, the same group of publishers will be shown (for each of the markets and for the region as a whole). The latter will enable Gemius to build the first pan-regional panel in the company’s history, something which can be later implemented for other regions. The possibility of a socio-demographical analysis in the study is of crucial importance for the MENA market. Thanks to the gemiusAudience study, the MENA population of internet users can now be presented as separate and unique target groups, according to their age, gender, education level, occupation, household monthly income, nationality as well as ten other indicators, says Maciej Mikołajczak, International Business Development Manager at Gemius SA. Providing such data will be of significant help for local media houses in campaign planning; at the same time, such information will prove helpful for publishers who wish to get to know their users better.
As far as the MENA region market is concerned, the population of internet users is estimated at 65-70m (total population in the region is 320m). As Wael Ghonim, Marketing Manager for the MENA region at Google predicts, there will be 100m internet users from Arabic countries in 2015. Online 2010 adspending in the region amounts to approximately 100m USD, which translates to a 1.5% share in total MENA adspends.
The implementation of the Ipsos/Gemius Audience study in the MENA region is a successful continuation of ongoing gemiusAudience research in more than half of all European countries. The MENA studies, as well participation in tenders in Australia and Israel, sees the Gemius success story of user-tailored projects come to continents outside Europe. On some markets, where research is undertaken in cooperation with local internet industry committees, gemiusAudience is considered the official currency of web measurement. In order to deliver possibly the most accurate and reliable data available, the research combines site-centric and user-centric measurement as well as questionnaires displayed on participating websites together with results of independent offline studies. This hybrid approach, pioneered by Gemius, is currently being followed by major competitors, and is becoming the world-renowned approach for internet audience measurement. Results delivered using gemiusAudience are an indispensable tool for representatives of media houses, publishers, advertisers, analysts and journalists.