Realestate.com.au has been applying updates to their portal fairly regularly recently and sometime late Tuesday night or the early hours of Wednesdays morning that applied another update to at least the individual property pages.
This time they have hidden the agents phone numbers behind some javascript code requiring the visitor to click on the “Phone This Agent” option to get access to this.
What happens is that when you click on it a Javascript Onclick command generates a pageview is counted in their web analytics program to a page called /buy/interaction/agentphonenumber.
It seems from this code that they use the hosted version of Google Analytics called Urchin.
It’s important at this point to highlight that this is the normal way to track “click” events in this program and it will not increase their pageview counts with Neilsen’s Net Ratings at all.
I thing we might be soon seeing realestate.com.au capturing these pageview to add to their monthly reports back to agents with wild claims that they generated xxx,xxx,xxx number of phone calls to our mobile and office numbers.
The page is certainly looking a lot cleaner than it was but since I don’t have a before screenshot from a year ago it is hard to put the finger on exactly everything that has been updated unless it is functionally different like the phone numbers.
It reminds me of the “trick” to ask someone to describe their own wristwatch in detail without looking at. Before you look at your watch answer these questions. Does your watch have a second hand? Is there number six on your watch dial, just a dash or is it the Roman Numeral VI or is there nothing there at all?
Their point is there is a big difference between observing something and seeing it. Something that we use and see everyday but it just becomes part of the furniture and you just accept it without really observing it.
Now I have said that.. I am not really sure that update happened overnight at all!