-->Google Real Estate One Year On – Some Results
July 11, 2010 by Simon Baker
It has been a year since Google entered the Australian real estate market with the launch of listings on Google Maps. In that time there has been much conjecture on whether real esate on Google Maps would be successful. Most of this conjecture has been hopeful or experiential rather than fact based. One analyst recently even went as far as downgrading their recommendation on the REA Group to a sell based on the potential impact of Google.
While facts are hard to come by and the Google team are relatively secretive as to the performance of real estate on Google Maps, we now have some facts to look at the impact of Google Maps on a mid-sized property portal in Australia.
I recently spent some time with one of the customers of the recently launched Nestoria Australia who also have all their listings on Google Maps.
The results of this discussion show that Nestoria Australia and Google Maps are performing equally as well in driving traffic to the portal. Given that Nestoria Australia is barely 4 months old, it could be concluded that Google hasn’t changed the Australian property portal landscape; in fact it has barely scratched the surface.
Here are the results for percentage of total traffic to the mid-sized portal from each source for May and June this year.
Source May
June
Nestoria Australia 4.91%
5.18%
Google Maps 4.56%
5.29%
What is also interesting is looking at the performance of customers sourced from both sources. Visitors from Google Maps had a slightly higher number of pages per visit with 3.09 pages versus 2.64 for visitors from Nestoria Australia. The bounce rate for visitors from Google Maps was 61% – slightly higher than for visitors from Nestoria Australia who had a 59% bounce rate.
So what can we conclude from this?
Firstly, real estate listings on Google Maps hasn’t changed the world as many predicted (hoped). At best, it has become another source of traffic for this midsized portal site. Given the traffic is free this is good news for them.
Secondly, real estate on Google Maps is either hard to find or does not have a compelling interface for visitors. Unfortunatley we dont have enough information to make a fact based conclusion on this. However, thinking about this logically, more people would be finding Google Maps than Nestoria Austalia (given it is 4 months old) and therefore we can probably conclude that the map based searching approach used by Google or the use of a property details page, is not providing a strong number of click throughs to the original advertisers site. (And also unlikely to be generating a strong number of leads due to the relative lack of contact details on the property details page.)
Finally, Nestoria Australia has done a good job in the last 4 months coming from a standing start to generating comparable click throughs with real estate on Google maps.
Disclaimer: Classified Ad Ventures, the publisher of Property Portal Watch, is a joint venture partner with Lokku (UK) in Nestoria Australia.
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