With the OFT having finally announced their decision to allow a merger between Zoopla and the Digital group of portals, the latest website traffic figures make interesting reading.
According to independent website monitoring firm Nielsen, the number of visitors to Zoopla grew faster than any of the other main UK property portals in March, putting Zoopla in second place behind Rightmove.
The figures reveal that Rightmove continued to lead the market with 3.62m unique visitors in March, up 4.4% year-on-year. Zoopla had 2.3m unique visitors, up 26.7% from one year ago. FindaProperty came in third at 2.16m unique visitors and Primelocation fourth with just over 900,000.
Of course, it’s too simplistic to put Zoopla’s unique visitor stats with those of Primelocation and FindaProperty, and decide that Rightmove would trail in second place once the merger goes ahead. Unique visitors are also by no means the only measure, and nor is Nielsen the only website auditor. According to Hitwise, Rightmove’s traffic is four times that of its nearest rival.
Property Portal Watch guru Simon Baker puts Rightmove’s page impressions at an astonishing 8.3 times the number of page impressions achieved by its nearest rival (and Baker says this is FindaProperty, not Zoopla).
Rightmove itself claims a huge market share of around 84% and is one of the UK’s top ten websites.
However, it is quite a thought that should Zoopla continue to grow at its current rate, would it have caught up with Rightmove all by itself at some point?
The question is hypothetical and we shall never know. But the sheer scale of the challenge facing the newly merged portal should not be underestimated.
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Comments
Hi
I think this competition offers agents a choice of what companies to advertise with as with no choice then prices will only go higher.
Ash
Newcastle Estate Agents
An anagram of Zoople Digital Group is:
a gigolo dipolar putz
Kinda catchy.
If RM wasn't so damned expensive i'd happily stick with just them and my own site etc, DPG's products are still pretty poor in comparison.
A huge monopoly - now a bigger duopoly
RM's traffic set to increase as agents trawl site to find full postal address as cheap canvassing method!
why on earth don't the big sites get ABC audited to put an end to these 'guestimates' from neilson/hitwise/comscore which also have big discrepanacies between them.
ABC will tell them and us how many actual visitors they receive. simples.
does anyone know why there isn't a culture of PROPER TRANSPARENCY on their visitor numbers provided through the ikes of ABC?
and can we bin any further chat on page impressions twaddle once and for all. until there is homoegeneity between how sites deliver pages, this adds a further layer of confusion. time on site is at least sensible as a measure of engagement.
Enquiries delivered is the name of the game.
Sadly just 2 competing portals is likely to in effect lead to a virtual or real cartel with no real price competition after the initial efforts on the part of Zoopla/DPG to achieve parity with Rightmove.
We might get some short term improvement but longer term prices will only go up.
The portals only get away with publishing these figures and selling advertising off the back of them because Agents are not very bright.
There are only 16,000,000 commission opportunities in the UK. (Owner occupied and Private rented Homes) it is laughable to suggest that every other Property in every single street in tyhe UK is sat looking at Portals every month.
If you are buying advertising space because of quoted hits, page views, clicks or unique visitors you are quite simply simple.
The page views are probably the agents checking stock and uploading.
Get ready for a price increase then!
9,000,000 unique visitors? DFO!
It is about time someone questioned the reality of the term "unique visitors"
9 million people each month to achieve 61,000 sales? A 0.6% conversion rate?
I know what i think of such claims and I know what I think of anyone claiming to be a Guru who supports such stupid Tosh