Creating Charts that Lie. Fake Website Analytics. Shame on You.

 

We have a love hate relationship with a firm in Michigan. Maybe you have one of these kind of relationships with another REALTOR or broker in your home town?

They love to hate us because we have taken away some of their former employees and some of their photographers to use our services. 

I was enjoying a good laugh today over some false facts their website had posted about Kayyah.com and it left wondering how many REALTORS have fallen victim to the same thing.

Has someone during a listing interview said some false things about you or your website in order to land the fish or make the sale? My guess is you probably have, or you know someone who has been made into an unfortunate victim of this. 

Liars. Cheats. Jerks who don't play by the rules. You can scream at them. Vilify them or ignore them. 

No matter what you do, some people will believe anything they read. A comedian I saw one night at the Improv once said," I believe everything I read. I actually read that men can breast feed. It's true. You have to tape two cans of evaporated milk to your chest to do this. So I wrote that down, then I read it. So it has to be true..."

This is the problem with most unsuspecting people who surf the Internet. Taken on face value alone, and with zero research, if you tell anyone visiting your website that you are the #1 Selling REALTOR in Dallas... how can the visiting and potential home buyer tell whether or not this is a true statement or not?

Those who post false statements about you on line can hurt, or sway another person's decision making as whether to use your firm, or Amazing Realty down the street. It's unfortunate and truly sad that not all of us play by good conduct and adhere to the REALTOR Code of Ethics.  But I am patient and I believe in Karma. What goes around... comes around sooner or later. 

So, back to the moral of this story. You see a pretty chart and it shows that you rank at the bottom.

But you know it's wrong.

Is there truth in advertising? Is your competitor ranking higher than you? It's easy to realize your competitor is simply grasping at straws when you are presented with false facts you can easily disprove. Just because Compete.com or some other so-called public traffic monitoring system says you rank here or there isn't always the truth. 

Below is a chart that compares Kayyah.com to RealTourvision.com and RTVPIX.com a gateway website for RealTourvision.com.

If you believed the numbers, Compete shows that Kayyah ranks on the bottom. 

 

 

 

 

But if you go to Kayyah directly and pull the Urchin charts, you see much higher numbers. These are Urchin Analytics (Google bought Urchin out three years ago).  In the chart below, this shows the number of daily website sessions Kayyah receives every day. This ranges from 2,266 to 3,500 or more per day. 

 

 

 

The chart below shows the entire summary of November. Total hits for the month are 2 million. Total page views is 625,458.  This means page views by real humans, not robots hitting the page. The average visitor to Kayyah spends 7 minutes on line.

 

 

 

 

 

So what have we learned by this? It's simple; Anyone can lie.

Anyone can show you a pretty chart and make false claims your website does or does not rank where you know it is ranking. Compete just like any other system has robots and crawlers. We have a HTACCESS and a Robots file which blocks the scrapers and robots from indexing and crawling our site. And you can do this too for your website.

Many MLS systems today do this, and this is why firms like Propsmart.com are dead.

Their system employed a web crawler that pulled listings from other websites. As the Internet tools got better, smart IT people who worked at those MLS data centers simply wrote in the command to BLOCK the Propsmart crawler and ta-daaa. No more stealing our listings to your website. 

IT ALSO MEANS that firms like Compete, Alexa, Nielsen and countless other website monitoring portals are not going to get the REAL facts of how many people are truly visiting your website. It's none of their damned business. This too, is another reason not to let their crawlers into your website if you do not welcome their visits and their posting stats about your website and selling them to other firms.  

Until the day comes when they ASK me to track visitors to my website or PAY ME money, then that's another story. But taking or assuming I have XXX traffic coming to my website and collecting bits and pieces of this without my permission is going to be inaccurate since I never gave them the log in to view my website stats.

I'm wondering if anyone on Active Rain has any stories like this one?

 

I'm including this one above in my new book I am writing now, "Real Estate Warriors. A Tale of 5 Winners and 5 Losers."  It will be available on QuickAudioBooks.com sometime before Summer 2010.

Happy New Year to all of you.

 

 

Bart Wilson | As seen in Business Week

I help build successful REALTORS. One agent at a time. 

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