I like the angle you took….

Ed from Nestoria here. Interesting analysis. As you point out comscore is far from perfect, but is a useful directional tool. Nevertheless, whether pageviews, visits, clicks or whatever is being measured, I think the true metric is leads – how many potential buyers are sent to sellers. Unfortunately no external measurement tool can capture this.

Thanks for your flattering comments about Nestoria. I do want to make one point though: Yes, we have grown our share of total visits, but this isn’t at the expense of others. We send Nestoria users out to our clients – ie the portals. We provide a simple service that allows users to search quickly and easily. Every one of those users then becomes a visitor to a portal – we make no attempt to keep them on Nestoria. By making the browsing process simple I would argue (and this is confirmed in our discussions with our partners) that we’re growing the total pool of potential visits for those sites that work with us.

Keep up the good work w/ PPW.

best,
Ed

FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com, while separate brands, are now part of The Digital Property Group (TDPG) – which also contains Findanewhome.com and homesandproperty.co.uk. TDPG approaches agents with a collective proposition so should be considered as a single entity in this kind of comparison.

Comscore’s figures for August show that TDPG is clear second to Rightmove and continues to make ground. The gap between the two was just 355k unique users in August 08, which is the smallest it has been to date. In August 2007 the gap was 1.09 million unique users. In May of this year it was 728k.

Although The Digital Property Group shows declining traffic, its year-on-year decline on the previous month (-4.6%) and year-on-year (-11.4%), is much healthier than its competitors. In comparison:

Rightmove has seen a 7.9% decline month-on-month and 29.5% decline year-on-year. Propertyfinder has seen a 6.3% decline month-on-month and a 23.5% decline year-on-year.

Hitwise is useful to show changes in market share but the relative values between the sites are often completely wrong. The use of percentage share rather than actual figures also reduces the value as it makes interpretation much harder.

I agree with you that ComScore is not necessarily accurate in terms of absolute numbers however, if we are more interested in relative sizes, then ComScore is the most accurate tool that exists. In addition, it is more accurate than circulation and readership numbers for traditional papers.

It is easy to trash the numbers however it is more important to understand long term trends, especially between players, to see if the market is truly changing or if it is just stable with alot of noise. For me, the UK market is pretty much stable at the top end with no real progress being made by anyone in the market.

What is more interesting is the rise of the nestoria’s, zoopla’s etc at the expense of the second tier.

Thanks for the comments and please keep them coming.

Simon Baker
Editor
Property Portal Watch

While I was working with a large UK sports portal we had access to Google Analytics and ComScore.

The difference in unique visitors was sometimes 50% out, page impressions varied between 20%-60% difference. Usually over estimates than under estimates.

I also find it hard to believe that of the 7 million users looking at houses on the internet only 37% use rightmove. With rightmoves dominance in the market people seriously house hunting would use rightmove as their first point of call.

Scotland however is a different matter, but with a population of only 5 million I doubt that Scotland would make such a difference.