Google Ad Planner update for SouthEast Asia

About 6 months ago, i blogged about the use of Google Ad Planner in Singapore and Southeast Asia region.
At that time, Vietnam and Indonesia were not even in the list yet. This time round, information about these countries are available!
Data is being updated until Jan 2009 which is recent enough.

I took a careful look into Vietnam market and found that the data is fairly accurate in terms of Unique Visitors. The category classification is a bit odd though.
For example:

  • VnExpress.net is in Music Category => a big NO NO, this is a Web Portal or at least it belongs to News section
  • The same with www.dantri.com.vn. This is essentially an Online Newspaper, not Audio & Multimedia
  • Baamboo.com is a local search engine specializing in Music, Video search, Mapping services, NOT “Home Improvement”‘

Please refer to the screenshot below for details.

Another point to note is that while there are about 19 million Internet users in Vietnam, Google Ad Planner only “defines” 6.8 million. Hence we can’t overly rely on the data at this point. It’s not a market where you can find reliable data easily though so Bravo Googlers!

It’s actually quite interesting if one likes to compare the stats from Google Ad Planner vs the stats provided by the Site Owner (so called media owner) or to compare stats for different Online Newspaper like VnExpress, thanhnien, dantri etc…

Another distinct difference we can see for Vietnam market is that Google Content Network coverage is still very very limited compared to Singapore or Malaysia where Google has ties with at least 50% of the top 10 sites.

A few other comments applicable for SEA region:

  • Filter function by site or keyword does not work yet. It would be great for advertiser to be able to display ads to people who are surfing on certain sites and also search for some specific keywords!
  • Demographics data is not available yet

In short, Google Ad Planner is still in beta and the data shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Other competitive intelligence firm like comScore, Hitwise or Compete do provide a deeper level of analysis and data availability. It is, however, recommended that Google Ad Planner numbers can be taken as guideline or to compare different sites, a quick and easy way of identify Google Content Network strength in certain verticals…

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