In recent years, the real estate website Zillow.com has seen increasing traffic. According to the traffic reporting site Alexa.com, Zillow's traffic is close to reaching, at long last, the venerable and dominant Realtor.com, which in years past we have favored over all other sites, mostly because of its excellent and fair search results (giving users what they need, not what advertisers want), and because of its towering dominance in national listings websites.

Here's a current comparison of the two sites' global traffic patterns in 2008-2009:

It's important to note that the huge blue spikes for Realtor.com traffic are most likely a methodological or technical quirk and not reflective of actually wildly fluctuating user traffic that is not reflected in zillow.com or other real estate search website traffic patterns (I've checked). Back end programming can alter how counts are made, and it appears Realtor.com changed something in 2009 that led to those spikes. Imagine the blue line closer to the bottom of the peaks and you see how overall reach to Internet users is close to Zillow.

However if Alexa's data is reliable, we see users clicking on fewer pages per visit. Again, this could be a result of programming changes on the site, such as automatic slide shows for example or the like, that reduce the number of clicks required to access the same level of content:

In this case, I suspect we see again that Realtor.com instituted programming changes in 2009, whereas Zillow.com may not have, that resulted in fewer clicks per user for Realtor.com, and so this information doesn't help us much understand the true behavior of end users -- buyers and sellers traffic on the sites.

This next graph is helpful I think. It shows how many Internet users are arriving at either site as a result of doing a search on a search engine, like Google or Yahoo or Bing. I think this metric gives us good insight -- given what we know about how search engines work -- about the trending audience reach of each of these sites. And it's here that I'm convinced that Zillow has been making gains. (I know, it's not rocket science.)

Again there' s some whackiness with the Realtor.com numbers, but this graph convinces me that probably multiple changes in programming methods by search engines and both companies enacted around the start of 2009 resulted in a convergence pattern. If the data here are accurate, then we see that Internet users searching for terms that would lead them to these sites are arriving at these sites in relatively equal proportions. If someone wants to do a formal regression and check into the measurement methodologies, I would be very grateful and will buy you a sandwich.

More important, however, for gleaning insight into how effective each of these sites are for actually delivering the content that our target audience wants, we have to conduct a separate and more qualitative analysis... which is soon to come...