Portal sites around the world use a range of statistics when marketing themselves to agents. However, these stats are always large and often mean nothing. The real question is, what information should an agent be asking for when looking at which portal to use?

Stats Explained

Portal sites bombard agents with a range of stats - each one bigger than the previous - and all designed to show why they are the biggest and the best site to advertise on. However, most of these stats are meaningless and dont actually tell the agent what they need to know. Here are some of the more popular stats put out by portal sites around the world.

Hits - now this has to be THE most meaningless statistic. It count how many times the server is “hit” when presenting a page to the user. Therefore two pages that look the same but are constructed differently will generate different numbers of hits. If you are quoted hits by a portal site - they probably dont have much to offer.

Page Impressions - this measures the number of page impressions or pages of information users look at - usually over the course of a month. For large sites these numbers can be massive - e.g. realestate.com.au had 528 million in August 2008. While a massive number, it doesnt mean much to the agent in one suburb.

Sessions or Visits - this measures the number of times someone visits the website - no matter what page they land on. This will also be a massive number and also not tell you, the agent, much about whether you should advertise on the site.

Frequency - this tells us the number of times, on average, a person visits a site and therefore gives you an idea of the popularity of the site. For example, a person who visits a site 3 times per month has a frequency of 3 and generates 3 visits. Sites with low frequencies (say <1.5 times per month) are usually generating traffic from SEO or SEM and that traffic is hitting the site and bouncing off. realestate.com.au, for example, has a frequency of just over 3 inicating the it has significant loyal traffic.

Unique Visitors or Unqiue Browsers - this attempts to measure the number of individuals that visit a site each month. Now this is probably not a true measure as it is calculated based on cookies and often people delete their cookies and therefore can measure the same person as being multiple people. Still, UV’s are as good a measure as you can get online.

Average Session Duration - this tells us how long a person stays on the site each time they visit. The longer the session time, the more properties they are looking at. Sites such as realestate.com.au have session times of nearly 10 minutes - this is massive and normally sites have session times of around 3 - 5 min.

Leads Generated - sites often attempt to calculate how many leads they generate. Now the reality is that they can measure how many emails are sent from the site to the agents and in some countries they can measure the number of phone calls they generate. However, they can not measure how many people visit the estate agent or just turn up at an open for inspection.

Detailed Property Views - when a user does a search on a property site, they generate search results and then click on the houses they like to see the property in detail - this is a detailed property view.

Stats the Matter

While all of the above are interesting, that is MOST important to an agent is what is happening in their suburb. Therefore all these stats about how well a portal site is performing at a global level is really useless to an agent as you want to know how well each site performs in your suburb.

Now the portals probably dont have this information or wont share it with you. However the stats you want to try to get a hold of are:

Searches Per Suburb - this is how many times a visitor to the site does a search on a particular suburb - the more that a suburb is searched, the more potential leads can be generated

Leads Per Suburb - this tells you how many emails and, if possible, how many telephone calls are generate on a suburb by suburb basis.

Leads Per Listing - this tells you how many emails (and calls) you are likely to receive for a particular listing in a particluar suburb

These are the measures that will help you work out how effective your advertising is on a particular portal site and allow you to compare how effective each portal site is in your suburb.