So just who is visiting online real estate sites?
Finding good publicly available (free) metrics to measure the popularity of a web site is a challenging proposition. Technorati rankings rate the number of inbound links, but measure only the activity in publicly accessible (i.e. spiderable) blogs. Alexa uses data from its toolbar to determine a site’s traffic, but is skewed by the number, and type, of people that have installed the toolbar.
There are commercial services like comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings or Hitwise, but these are generally expensive and of not much use to the little guy.
Quantcast is a new site that aims to try and tackle this problem. They are calling themselves the Open Internet Ratings Service, from their site:
Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of a half million web sites here. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
Quantcast creates a traffic overview and ranking for each site but drills down into some pretty interesting demographic data to see exactly who is visiting a site and how frequently they return.
Seems like Trulia has a bit of a ‘stickiness’ problem. People are passing by but not returning.
Quantcast – Profile for zillow.com
I wonder if this data will play into the NCRC’s complaint?
Quantcast – Profile for redfin.com
Wow, Redfin visitors make a lot of dough.
Blog owners or website publishers who want to get their site included in the results can submit their site through Quantcast’s Quantified Publisher Program. I did this recently with this site, and Quantcast is still compiling information on my visitors so it doesn’t have the same kind of rich data yet. You can see what they’ve got so far here.
