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Globrix hits out at rankings

07 January 2009

Daniel Lee, CEO of free-to-list property portal Globrix, has described his site’s ranking on the latest comScore figures as an inaccurate reflection of the reality.

On Monday, we reported that the latest comScore top 50 shows Globrix in 22nd place and newcomer, pay-per-lead PropertyIndex, in 15th place.

But yesterday Lee said: “Globrix’s ranking on comScore is a wholly inaccurate measure of Globrix’s actual traffic. We even have this in writing from comScore themselves, who admit they are unable to accurately measure traffic to Globrix because of its page structure and the various sophisticated platforms that power the site, such as AJAX. Similar search engines like the hugely popular Kayak.com suffer the same fate when it comes to comScore rankings, so to be ahead of Globrix on comScore means nothing at all.

“The reality is that PropertyIndex paid for the comScore position they have got to. If you want to pay a small fortune for PPC ads on Google simply to say you’re more successful than a competitor in any one month, then good luck to you, but the strategy won’t last very long – it’s hardly a sustainable use of funds. We prefer to spend our money on the site itself and the brand.

“You also have to ask whether buying traffic to send consumers to a site with only a limited number of properties is disingenuous. Is it really in the best interest of the consumer?

“Agents also need a break from all this empty sales patter. More than ever in this market, they need hard facts to help them make important decisions about how they market their properties, not propaganda.

“Increasingly, the public are tired of hearing about endless portals that list only a fraction of the properties available on the market. The single most important thing consumers want in 2009 is a website where they can find virtually every property to buy and rent in one place – and that is what Globrix offers.

“We have delivered a technology solution and business model that enable all agents to include their properties on the Globrix search engine for free and we now believe we have the largest index of properties in the UK.

“Our strategy in 2009 is to increase the brand awareness of Globrix across the country through media partnerships, a multi-channel marketing and PR campaign and the many great relationships we already have with agents across the country.”

However, Lee Bramzell, chief executive of PropertyIndex, denied he had bought his way up the charts.

He said: “I would like to go on the record as saying that PropertyIndex does not currently employ a Google PPC strategy, and that the increase in traffic we have experienced has been a result of implementing a range of marketing partnerships, including those with a number of affiliate partners.  As a cost per lead portal, we have been able to quickly establish a network of traffic referral partners who share in the revenue generated from these leads.

“This network is growing at a very rapid pace and we expect further growth over the next three months.”

Comments

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    funny to read DL critiquing goog PPC when globrix currently run google PPC ads on their site. i'm sure if they had higher comscore rankings they wouldn't complain, in spite of technical limitations; comscore is still considered industry's most reliable data source. i wonder how they currently rank with hitwise?

    • 15 January 2009 14:11 PM
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    Not sure what Globrix are on about either, using AJAX will have no effect on unique sessions served and those represent individual USERS.

    As for Globrix? what are they up to, if you scan the website it would appear that many houses are actually sold or in the wrong area's as their super clever spider misses the tags!...they never send us any marketing material and rarely fix any issues so what are they up to? just collecting a mix of obsolete and current houses for the sake of saying they have the most houses? who knows. Great concept, administrative nightmare and buyers that will soon get fed up and not use it. Pity because we'd all like to see it work for free !

    • 14 January 2009 10:02 AM
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    Dan from Globrix seems to have got a bit confused here, the ComScore stats he is objecting to are in fact the UV's (Unique Visitors) to the sites and nothing at all to do with the actual page views. The UV's would not be affected by their platform or AJAX (which many of the other sites including PropertyIndex also use) therefore these stats should be accurate when comparing like for like with other online portals. Seems like sour grapes from a site with huge backing that isn't quite getting the visitor numbers they were hoping for? Also, how on earth can spending money on PPC be considered "cheating"!? It's targeted advertising, nearly all online businesses with any sense advertise online with Google, surely that's a better way to target potential customers searching online for properties as opposed to TV or newspaper ads?? And on top of that surely the agents want results from the portals they list with (however the traffic to the portals are generated) and not excuses? Lets watch this space and see what happens in the coming months, should be interesting...

    • 09 January 2009 19:11 PM
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    I think Dan was more concerned with methodologies of ComScore's data collection. It is a panel based system meaning that the 40k (example) users who are part of the panel are judging traffic levels. I believe what AJAX does is give an inaccurate picture of page impressions. As Globrix has a ajax loaded listing page, the page impressions will not be accurate to activity on the website. Page impressions are not that interesting anyway. Lets hear about visitor volume and rate of click thru to agent website! :-)

    • 08 January 2009 10:17 AM
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    As much as I wish Globrix the best of luck, it is a shame Daniel Lee is talking absolute nonsense. Firstly, AJAX is not a platform and it doesn't power Globrix. AJAX powers site behaviours and is used on most modern web sites, including the top 5 portals. Their site runs on Linux, Apache and PHP and couldn't be more simple to rank - if only it had valid markup and standards compliant code. Sadly, it does not. Neither does it utilize Google XML sitemaps, a widely known standard to ensure pages are indexed by search engines and traffic ranking tools. Globrix does, however, use Google Analytics on every page so there is no reason why they cannot share the site's Absolute Unique Visitor numbers, along with bounce rate and pages per visit if they are intent on questioning the numbers. I also strongly object to Daniel Lee's suggestion that PPC campaigns are somehow cheating the system. PPC and other online channels are perfectly acceptable methods to bring traffic to a site. The fact that Globrix doesn't use it is far more likely due to their lack of funding than any strategic policy. This sort of analysis, no matter how dull, should come from EAT, not people like me in the comments.

    • 07 January 2009 19:43 PM
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    what would you expect from a free site -personally chased them re signing up 6 times then decided I could not be bothered...we however received marketing info this week from rightmove and propertyfinder so I guess its true - you only get what you pay for

    • 07 January 2009 17:19 PM
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    I am sure that Globrix would do even better if they sent out the marketing packs so that we could advertise the fact that we use them. We have tried numerous times to get one and I have yet to see one on the Estate Agents Ally in Swindon

    • 07 January 2009 15:40 PM
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    I'm sure Globrix would be No.1 if comScore were able to read the site - pity we'll never know... Touch convenient. Would be interesting for DL to venture how many visitors they get via their trusted internal stats...

    • 07 January 2009 12:43 PM
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