Businesses going on to online platforms or seeking to expand their online presence can research the media habits of consumers in the Middle East with a new tool by Google, the company announced Thursday. Insights MENA, a free online interactive tool available to the public without registration, allows users to obtain data on how urban men and women above 15 years of age use traditional and new media across five key markets in the region — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the UAE and Jordan — with plans to add more countries in the future. Users can explore categories such as media usage frequency and duration, internet usage, attitudes about online ads, mobile internet usage, social network activities, and e-commerce activities. These can be filtered by age, gender, and country with comparisons between countries displayed in a choice of graphics. Users can also download the graphics as Powerpoint presentations and Excel sheets, or share them on social network sites. The difficulty of getting accurate statistics and research in the Middle East, especially about online activities, was the main driver behind developing Insights MENA, said Najeeb Jarrar, head of marketing for Google Mena.Companies that commission their own research often keep the data a \"guarded secret\" or release huge documents that are not user-friendly, he added. \"There are no ads and no money [that we make] out of this research; we\'re just providing the information,\" he said. The research was conducted by AC Nielsen, with 1,500 face-to-face interviews in each country. The research, fed to the online tool, started in September 2010 and was completed in about January 2011. Google is still studying how frequently it will update the research, said Jarrar.Analysts said, however, that the biggest limitation of Insights MENA was that it does not give users real-time data.\"It\'s just offline surveys that Nielsen has done, that are put online in a graphical and easy to read format. It doesn\'t help because things change every minute,\" said Chris Fernando, Managing Editor of PC magazine. \"I\'m not sure how it\'s going to help media buying agencies or the publishing industry. It\'s there for the sake of it, it\'s not a very hardcore or well-thought out tool.\"The available research, dated January 2011, is considered old given the fast-paced changes in the online world, and also fails to track online trends like \"best deals websites\" such as Groupon, he added.Insights MENA would be more effective if it was paired with Google Analytics and the Google UAE webpage, he suggested. Still, it is an added value function that companies can now use compared to the time and costs of commissioning studies, Fernando said. There are other products in the market that offer a similar service, but Google has a trusted brand name that users are more comfortable with, he added. \"It\'s not unique but it\'s more dependable. That\'s the perception you\'ll have because it is coming from Google... there are other tools in the market, with different tracking analyses,\" he said, referring to websites such as Quantcast. Jarrar said other tools provide data on a smaller scale or are kept within the country that did the research but the Insight MENA allows companies, including SMEs that cannot afford the costs of commissioning studies, to share the data. From / Gulf News