Internet Statistics in Uzbekistan.

There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Benjamin Disraeli.

Digital marketing is developing rapidly and today it is already becoming one of the important marketing communication channels in Uzbekistan. But this area is new for most of Uzbek companies and not having any experience of promoting within online channels makes doubts for those companies. As result, they lose potential clients who use actively internet and use less traditional media. In this case, statistics can help to relieve insights of internet resources.

Initially, we would like shortly to describe differentiation among of internet channels. So online channels we can divide on three major groups: social media, search engine and RTB (real-time bidding) or programmatic. In Uzbekistan the most popular social media networks are Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, also we have to mention VK and LinkedIn, but their audience is too small that we will not consider in this article. There two main search engines are used by people in Uzbekistan – Google and Yandex. According to programmatic, unfortunately there is no one local platform, digital marketers use some solutions from other markets, but the most popular is myTarget from Mail.ru Group (Russia).

There are more 23 million Internet users in Uzbekistan (pict.1), it’s about 70% of whole population.

Visitors from Uzbekistan Some internal research based on statistics of the most popular internet resources in Uzbekistan illustrates that 70% of visitors are male and only 30% are female. Another interesting fact that mobile internet traffic share is at least 80%, meanwhile desktop internet traffic is only 20%. It is explained by growth of smartphones, decrease of mobile internet cost and new habits of people.

Considering social media, ok.ru or odnoklassniki is the first social network which has become the most popular in Uzbekistan and has the most number of users (table 1).

Social Network Users So we can see, that next popular social network is Instagram, which has grown almost twice for the last year (1 300 000 were at the beginning of 2019). And the third popular network is Facebook. Another interesting factor for consideration is an audience split between Tashkent and regions. These figures demonstrates that Facebook and Instagram have huge share of audience in Tashkent with 79% and 70% accordingly, meanwhile odnoklassniki covers more regions with 86% share. So this data allows understanding for companies which social network will be more useful for their internet campaigns in regard to cover only Tashkent or whole Republic.

Other key indicators are gender and age of users in social networks (graph. 1-3).

Here we can see that male audience has approximately 70% of share in social media using that proves figures which were mentioned above about gender structure of whole Internet in Uzbekistan. Additionally, diagrams highlight that 25-34 is the biggest age part in each social network, but we can notice one important thing that Odnoklassniki has audience 18-34 whilst Facebook and Instagram have 56% and 80% accordingly. These figures show that for searching more adult audience companies should consider Odnoklassniki and Facebook. And conversely, to launch internet marketing campaigns for young audience will be better in Instagram. So such simple figures help companies determine their digital marketing strategies with online channels, particularly which social network should be used for social media marketing (SMM) to communicate with target audience, build positive brand awareness and improve loyalty of consumers.

Unfortunately, we do not have any statistics of YouTube, but we can say that this video platform is one of popular social media in Uzbekistan as well. It is confirmed by alexa.com and similarweb.com which rank YouTube in top-5 of the most popular web-site in Uzbekistan.

Next group is search engine marketing (SEM) resources. There are Google and Yandex, Google prevails considerably as almost in the whole world (graph. 4).

According to graphic 4 we can see, that Google is must-have search engine in contextual advertising. But we must remember that Google and Yandex as well have wider opportunities for internet campaigns. So one of such possibilities is an ad placement in Google Display Network (GDN) or Yandex Advertising Network (YAN). Millions sites are connected to Google and Yandex, and we can promote our products or services using these wide networks. The main difference between GDN and YAN, YAN is the most popular among Russian-language web-sites. It means that more people know Russian than English in Uzbekistan, so they visit more Russian-language web-sites. In this case using YAN in Internet campaigns can be more effective than GDN.

And finally, we consider some statistics in myTarget programmatic. What is it myTarget? myTarget – the self-service ad platform by Mail.ru Group that covers 96% of the Russian market. More than 400 targeting options help to deliver online ads to the right users, reach your target audience. This platform includes all projects of Mail.ru: Search, E-mail, News, Property, Lady, Children, Health, Auto, Weather etc. Moreover, myTarget distributes advertisement through the most popular Russian social networks as VK, Odnoklassniki and MoyMir. Statistics shows a huge audience in Uzbekistan (graph. 5).

As we can see, just weekly audience in Uzbekistan is almost 3,5 million users. And also we can see here split male and female audience as 70/30 respectively. Using this programmatic, companies can find any audience which they want. It helps to create online advertising campaigns with different objectives such as Reach campaigns – to deliver advertisement to bigger audience, Traffic campaign – to increase traffic site, Lead campaign – to collect leads, online-video campaign (OLV-campaign) – to increase affinity and so on.

To sum up, we would like to notice that Internet is one of the important marketing communication channels with more than 23 million users or almost 70% of population of Uzbekistan. We cannot ignore this big audience, because it takes second place after television, meanwhile radio, print is far from this figure. According to provided statistics, we can see that companies can easily to find certain internet channel for online promotion with the best effort, using social media marketing in Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, search engine marketing in Google or Yandex, and programmatic myTarget. And so you can only decide what a superhero among internet marketing channels is for you and your company ?