What is Google Reach around Europe?
Almost anyone uses Google or some other search engine nowadays. Those that do not use Google may be very old and poor people. If you have internet, then it’s almost 100% chance that you are using Google, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, etc. Then is the Google reach number reflect if a country has many old and poor people? In this article, I will analyze Europe countries Google reach numbers against various aspects.
What is Google reach?
Google describes that reach is an estimate of how many people are in, or interested in, the location you select. It’s based on the number of signed-in users visiting Google sites. This means that Google reach number is how many residents are using google, gmail, google sheets, google disc, etc. in that country on an everyday basis.
In the first two bar charts below I am showing which Europe countries have the best Google reach and reach/population ratio.
Russia and Germany have most people (about 60 million) that use this search engine, despite the fact that Russia’s (140m) population is almost double of what Germany (84m) has. The second chart is representing the reach and population ratio.
Why does only 44% of Russian population use Google?
Let’s think why do less than half of the Russian people use google sites. Some would say that there are many poor and old people in Russia, so there are fewer people that are using the internet. The average salary in Russia these days is 45100 rubles per month as tradingeconomics.com reports. 45100 rubles equivalent is 700 dollars or 635 euros. It’s not that little in terms of the poorest European Union countries, so it isn’t Russia’s economy’s fault.
I think that the decisive factor of a bad Russian Google reach and population ratio has to be that many Russians use alternative search engines. Around 43% of people use Yandex.ru search engine in Russia.
Yandex.ru, like Google, provides many services like e-mail, local news, etc., so we can conclude that Russians are content with Yandex quality and don’t need to use Google. This reason has enough weight to exclude Russia from the following analysis.
Below we see TOP8 countries with the biggest reach/population ratio are mostly so called microstates. Usually there are a lot more people living, working and visiting those microstates than actual population. For example, Monaco has a population of 38695, but it has a lot of temporary residents who are not counted for population. Only Netherlands, Cyprus and Croatia are not microstates here, although these countries are popular among tourists.
Looking at the reach/population ratio vs population data, we can see that small population does not mean low reach/population ratio.
Small Balkan countries (Albania, Armenia, Kosovo) has very low reach rating. Although, we know that those three countries are very poor and very wealthy people lives in Monaco/Luxembourg.
Does wealthy countries have better Google reach / population ratio?
Let’s see how it will play against net income of Europe countries. I am taking median equalized net income data of year 2018 from eurostat and other sources. I drawn the scatter plot in Tableau to see if there are any correlation between measures that I have mentioned (Monaco is excluded because it is a small city state for millionaires).
Conclusion: Google reaches richer countries better
From what we see in those two scatter plots, we conclude that there are more google users per population in wealthier countries. R-squared values for trendlines are very convincing for this kind of analysis. R-squared value for Linear regression is 0.396 and for third-degree polynomial regression it is 0.445. Moreover, we could also exclude some borderline countries to make trendline even more accurate. These countries could be:
- San Marino (smallest Europe country),
- Azerbaijan (many people live in poverty and can’t afford internet, there is a big gap between the “middle class” and the poorest people ),
- Switzerland, Norway, Denmark (old school villagers usually don’t use the internet even though they earn more money)
In conclusion, this is a very interesting finding and I am eager to expand the research. I plan to add countries from the rest of the World to confirm this trend.