Is JustDial Traffic Inflated?
“Statistics are like mini skirts, what they hide is more interesting then what they reveal” – Siddhu.
Well, that’s the thing with web analytics/statistics as well and Justdial traffic seems to reveal more than what it should.
It seems that Justdial also adds up traffic from it’s employees/call center agent and that’s where the inflation – otherwise how do you explain, hr.justdial accounting for 4.7% of the traffic (not sure what’s dv.justdial, which accounts for 21.7% ?).
As far as modus operandi is concerned, this is how it probably works – when you call up JD’s call center, the agent will send you sponsored results (for category searches) – which is available on the screen. But, if you want more results – agent logs on to web and gives you the result – which in turn, adds to web traffic.
Do you think it’s fair to count internal employee traffic? If yes, what stops Internet companies to include their employee traffic in the analytics?
Or are we missing something here?
Hat tip: puzzled
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
I think it is fair enough. As Justdial provides Phone service also but you haven’t taken that traffic into account , we can just assume that the internal employees traffic reflects that traffic.
Really? How is phone service related to ‘web traffic’?
Qn- what stops Internet companies to include their employee traffic in the analytics?
It is not related to web-traffic directly but it can give an idea how popular a service is really. And wasn’t that the point of doing the analysis at the first place. Finding out how the local search engines are doing.
Also I think the traffic stats you are quoting aren’t the official ones released by justdial. Am I right? . In that case we are relying on some approximations done by another site (In this case Alexa). Now it is upto us what we make out of it. If we would like to believe that the Justdial employees are just sitting there and trying to inflate the numbers so that they can come out on top of list like this we can do so. But it may not be the reality.
Employee traffic to be made part of analytics is reasonable I think. In very few scenarios will it be substantial to really skew the overall numbers.
At the end of the day even internal web traffic is fulfilling a user request, just that the request was made via phone and there was an intermediary who helped fulfill it. Let’s assume someone calls JD and the phone exec does not find the required data on JD to help out, shouldn’t they possibly try out AskLaila to provide good customer experience?! Fair play I’d say.
yes…… you are misssing UU, if you look closely at comscore numbers the growth is there in UU so your logic does not hold……..
What stops JD employees to clear browser cache every morning? Dont you know the definition of UU?
It’s actually a shame that JD is adding it’s HR portal to the traffic as well. What’s next? their email clients as well?
Unethical.
If the stats were released by Justdial company itself, then it would certainly been unethical. But here we are talking about stats being collected by other sites ( Alexa ) so we can’t blame Justdial.
Why would justdial release a stat like that? All the web companies are tracked by alexa/comscore etc.
No co. will report it’s unethical practice and JD is no diff.
refer to some ABC of stats to understand how cos. tract websites.
Well. If justdial hasn’t released that stat and we are relying on some other company then that company(Alexa) is too be blamed.
if someone wants to cheat he can do it any which way, clearing browser cache ……. is not the only work they do to increase UU…….fooolish of you..do you know the defination of UU..
I think it is fair enough. As Justdial provides Phone service
Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic, but i want to know how phone service is related to web traffic
Yeah Sandya. That ways Airtel should also start adding operator traffic to website (and sell ad space there).
Seems Alok and Sandya are justdial emplpyees or vendors. They seem to not understand the very basic of analytics. Its always third party that collects data – otherwise you will see all inflated numbers from companies.
And its a shame that justdial uses its intranet to increase its traffic.
Ok. I am a fond user of Justdial Services and my company gets lots of business through Justdial. And Sure, I love that company. But it doesn’t mean that I will take the side of Justdial only for the sake of it. So we are relying on some third party to give us insights into the traffic of a site. Do you know how do they collect this data ? And what is the guarantee that the data is indeed correct. Or for that matter, have you ever ran a site which gets some decent traffic and tried to compare it with Alexa (or any other site) with the real traffic your site is getting. Third party data are just approximations. Just like the exit polls. You can/should form an opinion based on that but you shouldn’t bet your money on that.
Aha! SO that explains your opinion.
Dude – Ask JD why are they using intranet to inflate the traffic then.
In any case, your comments do not hold any value – you are just trying to pimp in your client.
Why my being associated with a company doesn’t holds any value. Can you point out any flaws in my reasoning.
If you feel that the internal traffic shouldn’t be part of stats, fine, we can just remove it. Also you should understand that the traffic stats we are talking about are collected by external agency which just extrapolates it from the samples it have collected. And the sample size is too small ( I am not sure but it may just be 5% of total internet users).
And as Arjun said it “At the end of the day even internal web traffic is fulfilling a user request, just that the request was made via phone and there was an intermediary who helped fulfill it.”
And I am sure Justdial isn’t paying 3500 odd employees to just sit on their computers and browse through justdial site so that they can increase their traffic stats.
Dude – Ask JD why are they using intranet to inflate the traffic then.
How about yahoo and google enabling the same with it’s 14K+ employees – they can sell more ads right?
Is that what you understand of analytics? Quite a shameful.
Go lick JD’s butt and get more business – but do not make a fool of urself and your company with such ‘insightful’ comments.
Well. It will be better if we argue on the basis of facts rather than name calling.
The question the blog author asked was whether it is ethical on Justdial part to include its internal traffic in the stats. First of all, the stats are provided by an external company so Justdial has no role to play in that. And if you feel that the internal traffic shouldn’t be included for comparison, fine then we can just remove the % of traffic coming from hr.jd or dv.jd ( As nitin have pointed out).
Also I think justdial doesn’t sell adspace on their site so your point about selling more ads based on traffic is mute.
Also a friendly advice. If you are doing business do get listed on Justdial ( In fact you should register on all the search sites) and maybe that will improve your business and based on the business generated from this sites, you can have a better idea about the traffic this sites are getting.
You can remove 5% of traffic from alexa – what abt comscore and several other public analytics tool that track sites?
Please understand that using your intranet traffic to inflate traffic number is the cheapest way to show your traffic growth – it’s actually a shame that lot of ppl (read: vendors) are supporting this.
“Also a friendly advice. If you are doing business do get listed on Justdial ( In fact you should register on all the search sites) and maybe that will improve your business and based on the business generated from this sites, you can have a better idea about the traffic this sites are getting.” – Do you have a referrer id? Maybe, you should get paid for that as well.
First of all read this. http://www.pluggd.in/india-digital-media/top-confusions-in-digital-media-3035/
Secondly my association with Justdial isn’t only for monetary reasons. I admire what the JD team have achieved so far and I am defending them only because I feel the work they are doing is great.
Referrer ID. That is a great idea. I think JD should start something like that.
more often than not, the better known players (justdial, asklaila etc.) quote the usage in terms of searches done rather than in terms of UU or visits. There are arguments both in favor and against of using this metric, however for simplicity sake – the argument in terms of searches is that the same user may have different queries pertaining to different categories.
I think we can not call JD unethical because they are not sponsoring this blog or supporting the visits statistic. If as a business you call them, they (asklaila and JD) will more likely talk in terms of searches done. Its the blog writer who has used this metric for comparison.
As for including intranet traffic, if we are comparing only the web-traffic then the intranet data should not be considered. And back of the envelope, since alexa is showing the % of traffic coming from hr.jd or dv.jd, we can simply remove them for comparison purposes.
Aren’t these stats from comscore used to sell ad space? And as a FYI – JD does have ad space on it’s site.
Then you should definitely read this post http://www.pluggd.in/india-digital-media/top-confusions-in-digital-media-3035/ . The traffic stats are extrapolated from a panel size of 16,000. You want to bet your money on that ?
Panel is representative. When you go to advertisers, you actually show them your comscore numbers.
Look at the fight between shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony over comscore numbers (last year)
The confusion as mentioned is over the quality of measurement and that remains.
The bigger qn is why shd somebody use it’s intranate to exploit these numbers?
Are you sure JD does that ? I mean they approach businesses and show them comscore numbers.
As for “why should somebody use its intranet” question , because that is fair as Arjun have already pointed out
“At the end of the day even internal web traffic is fulfilling a user request, just that the request was made via phone and there was an intermediary who helped fulfill it.”
So including the traffic generated by Phone is fair enough since what matters to a business is number of enquiries generated. For eg:- I don’t care if I get enquiries from people who are searching for a website designing company on net or who used phone service to reach me. For me, it only matters that I am paying money to JD and they provide me business prospects.
I don’t know about the fight between shaadi and bharatmatrimony but if they are fighting over comscore numbers , it would have been totally pointless.
Hi let me introduce myself as zzohan and also who has seen in and out of just dial for many years.
The company believes in One mission growing , growing & only growing.Their concerned is MONEY.They do like to work with ethics but only to a basic level.Their policies change overnight,their staff commitments and follow up changes overnight,Their staff has been so much hypnotised and has been framed that there is no world outside Justdial.So they do what their seniors ask them to do.
I have personally seen many of their staffs not being happy but they do not have the courage to come out of it.
It will be a great help to humans if their staff can be guided and supported to live their life not a life in prison.
Its a shame for any company to use sideways or manipulate the strategy to develop their business & company like just dial with huge staff will definately take the first initiative to do such activity.
I am not among the people who love to bad mouth & show only bad features of the company.
“At the end of the day even internal web traffic is fulfilling a user request, just that the request was made via phone and there was an intermediary who helped fulfill it.”
SO ans my QN – Why companies like yahoo/google/msn do not include tracking codes on their intranet?
Traffic, at the end of the day is a number one boasts of to advertisers,investors and competition..
@aolk- My 2 cents of suggestion: Grow beyond your business with JD and see if such malpractices hurts the industry and other competitors
Avinash. Do you really know how comscore tracks data. If not then you better find out since it doesn’t depend on whether JD include codes on their intranet or not.
And would you care to explain how this is hurting industry and competitors. From a normal business man perspective, it doesn’t matter to him how much a site gets traffic. What matters to him is whether that site generates any business for him. And if JD or for that matter, any other local search player generates business for him, he will continue being a member of that site. Also if the businessman had been fooled by displaying exaggerated traffic data, do you really think he would continue with that site for long.
Interesting insights. If you look at traffic for local content/search in any specific city, the leader is fullhyd.com, a local guide to Hyderabad. I am trying to post the link giving the stats, but the comment is not getting in. Please click on the Advertisers link on fullhyd.
Please see this about JustDial:
http://www.consumercourt.in/other-product-services/394-just-dial-review.html
They don’t give written agreements, and make the rules as they go. Bizarre, isn’t it ?
Most advertisers are very unhappy. The VCs/investors should research this company more carefully.
Sam