Independent market data, while still unconfirmed by external sources, indicated a sudden interest by team members at Google headquarters in studying potential acquisition targets in China’s real estate media market. (Or at least we at RightSite sincerely hope so).
While we were reviewing our weekly web traffic report at RightSite today we came across what appears to be a rabid RightSite fan club in Mountain View, CA — some group of folks at Google spent more than 178 hours visiting nearly 200 pages on RightSite last week. Now I’m a big fan of our website, and of industrial development in general, but this seems perhaps a bit fanatical.
Thanks to the wonders of Google Analytics, we are able to get copious data on what people do on RightSite, and to some extent, who they are — or at least where they are and what service provider they are using. When our marketing team mentioned today that someone in Mountain View was spending a lot of time on RightSite last week, I immediately thought of the Big G.
Sure enough, if we filter our pageviews from Mountain View by the service provider (usually this gives you the name of the ISP used, but in this case Google is their own ISP) then we can see this surge of traffic from someone at Google.
In examining the pages that this user was looking at, it seems they are not only viewing the articles, property listings and companies on RightSite, but they are also viewing in both Chinese and English. Seems they have a good bilingual team in Mountain View. Here are a few key statistics on our traffic from users at Google Inc last week:
- Days measured: November 8th to 13th
- Total time on site: 178 hours
- Total visits: 21
- Pageviews: 227
- Unique Pageviews: 221
- Average Time on Page: 54 min, 52 seconds
- Average Time on Site: 3 hours, 24 min, 38 seconds
What all of this means, is anyone’s guess. One of the reasons that we aimed for an industrial niche for RightSite is that a small startup like ours needs to beware of venturing into consumer giants such as Google tend to launch ventures. So I doubt that Google as a corporation has suddenly taken an interest in China’s industrial real estate sector. At the same time, with this many hours over such a brief time span, it would have to be a team of people involved. (And as far as I know, Googlebot does not spend several minutes on each page).
So what does it all mean? Is Google planning to make us an offer for RightSite? Is someone working on their 20% time project thinking of venturing into China’s industrial real estate market? We will keep studying their visiting behavior, but any insights from readers are also welcome.
Leave a Reply