According to the latest roy morgan research realestate.com.au (majority owned by news limited) continues to dominate its Fairfax-owned rival, domain, in the battle for the highly lucrative property search sites.
Whether on a computer or mobile device, over 3.5m Australians accessed Realestate.com.au via website or app in an average four weeks in the six months to December 2014, up from 3.3m in the six months to December 2013.
During the same period, 1.7m accessed Domain, down from 1.8m the year before.
The total audience growth for Realestate.com.au comprised an increase in the number of both website visitors (up six per cent) and mobile phone or tablet app users (up seven per cent).
Year on year, Domain’s fell seven per cent in the number of people visiting in an average four week period, while the number using the app fell 15 per cent.
Number of Australians accessing property site in an average four weeks
Realestate.com.au | Domain | |||||
Jul-Dec 2013 | Jul-Dec 2014 | Change | Jul-Dec 2013 | Jul-Dec 2014 | Change | |
visited website | 3,257,000 | 3,452,000 | 6% | 1,738,000 | 1,624,000 | -7% |
used app | 722,000 | 773,000 | 7% | 434,000 | 367,000 | -15% |
total audience | 3,336,000 | 3,572,000 | 7% | 1,815,000 | 1,698,000 | -6% |
Source: Roy Morgan Single Source, July to December 2013 n = 23,494, July to December 2014 n = 26,516 Australians 14+
Tim Martin, general manager media, Roy Morgan Research, says: “Roy Morgan’s audience research provides a true and usable measure of the number of people visiting websites or using apps across different devices.
“The recent argy-bargy between REA and Domain over technical aspects of their website visitation numbers highlights just how muddy the waters have become for advertisers, agencies and investors needing a simple, consistent and independent measurement of audiences.
“Roy Morgan’s audience measurements simply show how many Australians visited digital media. We measure consistently over time and consistently for different sites. That way we can always compare apples with apples.”