Hitwise Real Estate Analysis: Website Ranks

January 28th, 2010 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Apartment Market Info, Facts & Figures | 2 Comments »

Each month, Hitwise, a competitive search intelligence company for online advertising, releases a Monthly Category Report for the real estate industry based on traffic to websites and search terms. They rank websites according to visits and search terms based on which keywords typed into search engines resulted in a visit for a ranked site. The information is derived from a sample of 10 million U.S. internet users with rankings done by market share.

*interesting side note – needed bing.com’s search to find above image

For example, according to the December 2009 Hitwise Monthly Category Report – Real Estate, MyNewPlace was ranked 11th, with a market share of 1.28 percent. Therefore, of the 10 million internet users surfing the web, MyNewPlace received 1.28 percent of the visits to sites that Hitwise places in the real estate category.

This is a pretty big step for us, as it was about a year and a half ago when MyNewPlace first entered the top twenty, at number 19 with 1.04 percent market share. We look forward to breaking into the top ten very soon, perhaps even for January 2010!

Ranking in the top ten is significant because of the volume of visits those sites receive; of the 3,289 sites ranked, 30 percent of traffic went to the top ten sites. This consolidation for top sites is also up: back in July 2008, only 23 percent of traffic ended up at one of the top ten sites; this statistic is now up more than a quarter, indicating that top sites are doing an effective job capturing online audiences.

So what’s driving an increasing number of internet users to those top sites? Have they done an effective job with online branding? Are they ranking well for all the valuable keywords? Are they able to rank well for all the permutations on core terms and reach the long tail?

Tomorrow we will attempt to answer those questions by examining Hitwise’s Search Term information.