globrix.com Hits UK Top 4
August 4, 2009 by Emma Sorensen

According to figures supplied by comScore, globrix.com has hit the coveted number 4 position in the UK property portal rankings.
globrix.com announced the news on their blog, saying:
“We’re very pleased to announce that our traffic in July was our best yet. We received 1,100,555 unique visits, an 11% increase on our unique visits in June….which had also been a record breaking month!”
They also published the latest top ten from ComScore in terms of total visitor numbers:
1. Rightmove
2. The Digital Property Group (FindAProperty etc)
3. PropertyFinder
4. Globrix
5. Homeswapper
6. Nestoria
7. Trovit UK
8. Zoopla
9. Fish4Homes
10. PropertyNews
globrix.com recently announced a site revamp and new mobile version of its website.
And it’s certainly not the only UK portal reporting increased traffic this summer. zoopla.co.uk reported a 25% increase in July, and similar successes have been reported by DPG, propertyindex.com and rightmove.co.uk.
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Beware the portal that claims it’s grown but has no proof!
I think PortalWatch should do its homework before it simply reiterates a portals own self-absorbed announcement on its blog. For too long now portals are getting away with simply ‘lying through their teeth’ to claim big numbers and trying to prove to agents they are the ‘best’ and the ‘biggest’.
As an industry, we need someone to come down on us hard to sourcing our stats. And at the moment we can only use comScore to compare. As leads, property no.s, Agent no.s etc are all down to the portals own internal figures.
So PPW, you say Globrix is number 4 by Visitors? They’re not no.4 as a lone website They’re no. 7 when you look at UVs – which is the industry standard!!!
And according to comScore, the overall category went down 6.6% (from 7,402,000 in May to 6,911,000 June 09)
And so did most portals… except Primelocation. They had a fantastic growth and moved into no.2 position. So look at them, ask them what they did to achieve such growth. Maybe high-end property is on the rise? Or did have they changed their website? Or maybe we shoudl question comScore – they are, afterall panel data only. And, June’s data was out very, very late this month. Why?
So who went down in June?
1. Rightmove DOWN (-8.3%)
2. Primelocation UP (+12.6%)
3. FindaProperty DOWN (-15.1%)
4. Propertyfinder DOWN (-7.1%)
5. Vebra UP (+2.1%)
6. Nestoria DOWN (-14.8%)
7. Globrix DOWN (-8.9%)
8. Trovit UK Homes DOWN (-13.7%)
And Zoopla state they had 25% growth in July and so Globrix are talking about July too, but you are talking about comScore figures for June…so putting all this info together is confusing in itself.
Why twist the metrics – Globrix? Position 5 is not bad. For all interested readers, here is the ranking according to Total Unique Visitor numbers (the better metric to use).
1 RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK
2 The Digital Property Group
3 Propertyfinder Network
4 Nestoria
5 GLOBRIX.COM
6 Trovit UK Homes
7 ZOOPLA.CO.UK
8 Fish4homes
9 Mouseprice.com
10 HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK
Definitely some funny numbers here. I observe that in your other post, Zoopla claim 1.35m visits in july to Globrix’s 1.1m, so how can Globrix be ranked higher??
The “latest top ten” is June 2009. July numbers won’t be available until at least August 15th.
Globrix was careless mixing that chart with their own number which already include July.
Thanks for your comments everyone, I think you’ve brought up some interesting points for discussion, particularly Portal Watcher who wrote:
“As an industry, we need someone to come down on us hard to sourcing our stats. And at the moment we can only use comScore to compare. As leads, property no.s, Agent no.s etc are all down to the portals own internal figures.”
What does everyone else think?
Also – we made it clear in the post that the data was supplied from globrix.com’s blog and not by us.
Thanks Emma. I think unique visitor traffic is the most important metric. The number of leads cannot effectively be side-by-side compared, because some portals pass traffic, some pass qualified leads. I think given the lack of anything better, a mixture of ComScore, Alexa, Google trends, and Compete.com should give a reasonably good picture of relative positioning.
Hi Emma and Paul HJ,
First of all, Emma I understand that you have sourced directly from Globrix, but as you become a credible source it’s important you validate what you repost.
As for the universal or trusted metric, I think we can’t simply use UVs anymore, especially when explaining our rank to estate agents and trying to show the value of being on one portal instead of another.
Many have varying services, from great agent reporting tools to great consumer tools. I personally think Rightmove continue to lead in the services they offer, for both agents and consumers, so therefore yes, they are first and this reflects their UV numbers too.
But, UVs can be as I like to say ‘One-click-wonders’, so UVs and page views need to be hand-in-hand to truly show which sites people prefer to use in the home moving process.
One of the best tools, on any portal, are email alerts. And if we could actually find out how many active users each portal has registered, then that would be an interesting and highly qualified metric to measure them on.
But as I said before, internal figures, so highly unlikely we will ever get that opportunity. However, if you are an agent reading this, ask every portal to tell you how many people are registered to receive email alerts for properties in the areas you list.
They’ll be dumbfounded! Don’t expect millions, but you’ll discover just how many people are actively looking in your area. This coupled with the rest of their services and stats should help you to make the most informed decision on which portals to list on and work with.
Actually, I should have said all three – UVs, visits and page views. This will then truly show how ‘popular’ and ‘qualified’ the sites audience is. Rather than just the one-click-wonders.
Actually, I should have said all three – UVs, total visitors and page views. This will then truly show how ‘popular’ and ‘qualified’ a site’s audience is.
Is everyone reading the same comscore data for June? I have it here in front of me and it clearly states the top 4 sites for total visits includes Globrix if you remove vebra (which I think we all agree is not a portal). This just goes to show how confusing it is. More importantly is unique visitors really the most important if the ratio of uniques to total visits is very low. In other words simply having a person visit a portal once is a sure sign that the portal is not actually working. You really need a high number of uniques with a high multiple of total visits. With regards page views this has to be treated with care as some sites send the user to other sites to view details thereby reducing total pages views; whereas others like add additional pages (such as the one you get asking you to confirm you search area on Rigthmove) which clearly gives more page impressions but does not necessarily mean that the user is any more valuable. At the end of the day the key question is not how much traffic or how many page views but how effective the portal is in driving estate agency business. We all know who is best at that!
Nielsen NetRatings is a pretty decent source too – although subscriptions are expensive and hard to come by.
UV’s are absoutely the right measure here and month on month growth of such. They indictae a portals ability to drive traffic to its site and whether it is growing or falling. Globrix numbers are rubbish and twisted. Look at alexa.com for Globrix and it gets even fishier – more than half their traffic seems to be internally generated and not even real. comScore and Nielsen are the 2 best sources of data and whilst not very accurate monthly on their own (and generally undercounting) they give a pretty good idea of which are the biggest sites and who is growing and who is not. Caution – beware of some stats which are not generated by users looking at property – RMs stats on things like page views and visits are inflated by agents logging in at looking at backend tools and Vebra is a good example – these visits are not proeprty shppers, they are all agents using the system.
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