Search, PPC, Performance, Social, Turkey

Turkey: a place of opportunities in digital?

Experiencing the Turkish online market on a daily basis and having an experience with Central-Eastern European ones I always a little bit confused what’s going on here.
In the one hand I see lots of creativity and world-class online marketing solutions but in the other, sometimes it looks like there’s still a very-very long way to go for online businesses to grow and reach the service levels of the more developed markets. So confused I started looking for benchmarks and here’s what I got.

I calculated the per capita (per internet user) online spendings (search, ppc included), and put that up on a chart with per capita (total population) GDPs.
I know statisticians would run crying seeing these together but it just supports my experience with the markets.
I used 2008 local IAB spendings versus Internet World Stats combined with CIA World Factbook GDP per capita data. Wherever I could.

I took a look at countries that somehow do not fit in:

• Norway. The highest per capita GDP, but only the third place in per capita spendings. This I call an opportunity for marketers.
• Italy and Spain. Somehow a bit of a surprise for me. Although they are in the upper region of per capita GDP, the online spendings do not show the same. Opportunity as well.
• Hungary (my home country) is way ahead a lot of countries as of the maturity of the online market (see the low GDP/capita vs. relatively high online spend/capita)
• Russia, Turkey, Romania. All at the end of the chart as of per capita spendings and in per capita GDP as well. Please not that there are huge differences comparing just these three to each other.

I thought that I will get a clear evidedence confirming my assumption that there is a big opportunity in Turkey for marketers. Actually, the results are not so clear on that but I’m still confident that at the EUR 6,5 spent online / internet user rate Turkey is really a good place for investments in digital.

Not to mention that Turkey is the third largest country on Facebook.

Some other ideas that I had during posting this:
- Crisis leveled differences: growth of online ad spend almost stopped in the States, slowed down dramatically in UK and Germany, but it still grew double digit in Eastern Europe and I believe it grew a lot here in Turkey.

- No big jump. Although the less developed countries grow on a higher rate (as of spendings), they usually do not jump big. Reaching the EUR 20 current Hungary level per capita spending would mean tripling the current spendings in Turkey. So that will last for at least 2-3 years, surely.