Property portals around the world use a range of statistics when marketing themselves to agents. These stats are often large but can mean very little. The real question is, what information should an agent be asking for when looking at which portal to use? Here is a run down of some of the more popular stats put out by portal sites around the world, and where you should be focusing:
Hits. This has to be one of the most meaningless statistics. It measures how many times a portal’s 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, chances are they don’t 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 portals these numbers can be massive. For example, rightmove.co.uk had 3.9 billion page impressions in the first half of 2010. While a massive number, it doesn’t mean much to an individual agent in one suburb.
Sessions or Visits. This measures the number of times someone visits a portal, no matter which page they land on. This will also be a massive number but does not tell you, the agent, much about whether you should advertise on that portal.
Frequency. This tells us the number of times, on average, a person visits a portal and therefore gives you an idea of its popularity. For example, a person who visits a portal three times per month has a frequency of three and generates three 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.
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 “web cookies“, and often people delete their cookies. Therefore, a UV count can measure the same person as multiple people. Still, UVs are as good a measure as you can get online at this stage.
Average Session Duration. This tells us how long a person stays on a portal each time they visit. The longer the session time, the more properties they are looking at.
Leads Generated. Portals often attempt to calculate how many leads they generate. They can measure how many emails are sent from the portal 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 real estate agent or turn up at an open for inspection.
Detailed Property Views. When a user does a search on a property portal, they generate search results and then click on the houses they are interested in to see the property in detail. This is a detailed property view.
Stats that Matter
While all of the above stats are interesting to some degree, what is most important to an agent is what is happening in their suburb. Many portals probably don’t have this information, or won’t be keen to 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 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 phone calls are generated 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 and allow you to compare how effective each portal is in your particular suburb.
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