Digital 2020 Report – Middle East Analysis

After trawling through 247 pages of the Global Digital Report from Hootsuite and We Are Social, we found some interesting insights that challenge some of the thinking in the region when it comes to digital in the Middle East. You can read our thoughts here… 

The same report writers also produce data on a country by country basis, so here are some insights from those… For those of you who want to read the reports yourselves.. here are the links

• Saudi Arabia  | United Arab Emirates | Kuwait | Bahrain | Oman | Qatar

The challenge with all data in this part of the world is lack of context. There is no demographic data included, except for age and gender, so there is no way to know what the splits are between locals and ex-pats, or which group of ex-pats!

Digital in the Middle East – Analysis

The biggest mistake that a lot of marketing people still make is to lump the Middle East, the GCC and all of it’s inhabitants into a single audience. This monolithic approach to marketing, perhaps born out of the old-school Newspaper and TV mentality just wont work for digital.

Let’s start with something simple. The relative share of Android devices versus iOS. Globally, Android has about 75% of the market compared to Apple’s 25%. Anecdotally, the Apple share in the Middle East and the GCC is higher… but by how much?

If you are a product manager in Oman, I wouldn’t put an iOS App on the road-map unless I was sure that the 11% of the population who have an Apple device are my customers.

Why Aren’t You Running Google Ads?

We gain a lot of insights from local businesses through our Training Courses in the Middle East. Many companies spend a huge proportion of their online marketing budget on Social Media platforms. There is nothing wrong with that… but, the reality is that Google sites rank as 3 of the top 5 websites in all countries in the region. (Apologies for the formatting if you are viewing on mobile 😉 )

This is backed up by information in the same report that says the Top source of brand discovery is Search Engines (31% in KSA, 38% in UAE, no data is available for other countries). We plan on a separate article about these stats…

Not All Social Networks are Created Equal

The Global report shows that countries in the Middle East have an (unhealthy) obsession with social media. Depending on who you talk to, Instagram is the network of choice, but once again, the data doesn’t seem to agree.

Let’s have a look at the gender splits for social networks in the region. The following table shows male / female ratios. (Caveat – these are declared gender profiles! and no, they don’t all add up to 100)

Is your customer female? Are you using Snapchat? It seems like Snapchat has a higher percentage of females than other channels. In fact, in KSA, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, females outnumber males.

The numbers also suggest that networks like Twitter and Linkedin could be worth testing for certain markets and audiences. In Saudi Arabia, Twitter has 14.3 million users and Linkedin 4.1 million.

Coming Up….

We had been looking forward to sharing some of these insights through our Partners at Seamless Middle East, however we have learned today that the event has been postponed to September. In the meantime, our digital training courses have been updated to include these insights.