realtor.com Reports Strong Month on Month Traffic Growth

Earlier this week Move Inc, the owner of realtor.com, reported that they had strong month on month growth in their traffic to the realtor.com site.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, the realtor.com site had a increase in traffic of 29% from June to July and that the overall time spent on the site increased by 26%.  I am not sure whether they are referring to total minutes on site or average session duration.  If it is total minutes on site, then of course that will increase in line with an increase in the number of people visiting the site.

Now I dont put much credibility in month on month growth in traffic purely because it can be affected by so many variables:

• June has 30 days while July has 31 days
• June may have more public holidays than July
• An extensive Pay Per Click campaign may have been run in July to bolster traffic numbers
• A new content distribution deal may have been launched
• Even the underlying panel data or the methodology may have changed during the period

What is more important is to look at year on year growth for the business using comparable months.  Luckily the Move Inc guys also reported the growth of realtor.com on a year on year basis.

On a year on year basis, assuming they are referring to July 2008 vs July 2007, realtor.com had the following growth:

• Total UV’s for realor.com in July 08 were around 6.3 million
• Year on year traffic (i assume UV’s) growth was 9.5% – therefore UV’s in July 07 were probably around 5.8 million
• Page views increased by 22% on a year on year basis

With page views up significantly more than the growth in UV’s, you can deduce the people are spending more time on the site.  It would be interesting to match this against total sales volumes and to determine if they are just tracking the value of their homes or if they are truly transacting.  My guess is that it is more likely to be the first.  This is good for display ad sales but not so good for driving leads to the agents.

Now what they also did was release some search information that shows the increase in searches in specific areas:

• Stockton-Lodi, CA (140.9%),
• Las Vegas, NV (93.9%),
• Fort Myers-Cape Coral, FL (69.5%),
• Detroit, MI (51.8%)
• Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV, VA (49.1%).

There is a more complete list at http://marketing.realtor.com/julysearch/

Given the significant growth in searches in these areas, and the overall growth in visits being around 9.5% over the course of the year, i wonder where are the areas that had significant decline in the number of searches.  Now that would be interesting reading.

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