Comments on: globrix.com Hits UK Top 4

By: London Flat Rental Advertising Today « Renting Flats in London

London Flat Rental Advertising Today « Renting Flats in London — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:37:43 +0000

[...] Source:http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/2009/08/globrix-com-hits-uk-top-4/ [...]

By: Jon Trent

Jon Trent — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:22:39 +0000

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.

By: David

David — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:23:01 +0000

Nielsen NetRatings is a pretty decent source too – although subscriptions are expensive and hard to come by.

By: craig daniels

craig daniels — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:16:15 +0000

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!

By: Portal Watcher

Portal Watcher — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:53:22 +0000

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.

By: Portal Watcher

Portal Watcher — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:50:33 +0000

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.

By: Portal Watcher

Portal Watcher — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:43:29 +0000

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.

By: Paul HJ

Paul HJ — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:26:23 +0000

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.

By: Emma Sorensen

Emma Sorensen — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:54:24 +0000

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.

By: mtm

mtm — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:57:06 +0000

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.