For those of us who pay attention to these things, the recent rise in SimplyHired’s traffic on Compete and Alexa was noteworthy. Since April, both services show a dramatic rise in traffic – see chart to right, click for larger view). And more importantly, they show SimplyHired overtaking competitor Indeed, even though they have historically trailed them in reach and traffic.
There’s a problem though: Comscore shows no such increase in traffic – Indeed is still far ahead of Simply Hired in terms of unique visitors. The Comscore data is shown at the bottom of this post.
Here’s what the source of the discrepancy might be: We have heard that Simply Hired may have started buying a very large number of “pop-under” advertisements from WhenU. Comscore says that they filter this “push” traffic out of their stats. I suspect Alexa and Compete do not.
WhenU is regarded by many to be nothing more than malware, and users who’ve had it infect their machine spend a lot of time trying to get it removed. There are a number of forum threads where people try to help others remove it.
So, the question is, is Simply Hired associating itself with WhenU? Why? Is the only purpose of the ads to drive Simply Hired higher in the rankings of some of the metrics services? I have an email into their PR group, and await an answer.
“Compete says that they filter this “push” traffic out of their stats. I suspect Alexa and Compete do not.”
Did you mean Comscore?
yes, thank you.
Another company notorious for doing this is dailymotion
-Zaid
Hmm, interesting. If they are doing it, I am hopeful it’s a mistake. I have enjoyed my dealings with both Indeed and SimplyHired.
I posted another possible thought here:
http://www.cent...deed-in-traffic
Basically I am wondering if their publisher system “job-a-matic” could also perhaps be playing into the increase. Assuming somehow it’s hitting their server (iframe?), then any new publishers would increase their traffic as well. This is just potential speculation as to either the cause, or perhaps an additional cause.
SimpyHired = SimplyHired
Hey, at least you have a good editorial team built into your comments
Guys, don’t forget about myspace jobs, a good portion of their traffic is probably coming from myspace.
Arrington stay off the merlot, you drunken bastard.
yeah, well, it’s Saturday. Thanks for the typo fixes.
yeah, well it’s saturday? come on michael. you’ve got really shoddy editing going on at TechCrunch. It’s almost too painful to bear sometimes. I mean, I love this site, but come on. You want to be taken seriously right?
Anyway, being as how LinkedIn uses SimplyHired as a job search function, I don’t doubt these numbers.
Mike – it’s Saturday evening there and you should be out partying like a rock star, not writing …
go on now.
James – don’t like the site, don’t come here. It is what it is. And sometimes that includes typos.
There is no way anyone can increase traffic rate by just using any tricks. Permanent web traffic can be increased by only one way, it is good content of the web. Why not they are trying to put something useful stuf at their website.
This is extremely common in the dating industry and neither Comscore, Compete.com or any other measurement firms are good at filtering out this sort of traffic.
Take a look at true.com They stopped using adware and traffic dived from “40 million visitors” a month on compete.com to 12 million. And hitwise reported they went from 20% marketshare to 4%. Comscore stats were just as screwed up. Right now singlesnet.com is using major adware and show the same inflated rankings.
The problem is most of this stuff isn’t really trackable. Comscore and hitwise will filter out specific URLS of popups IF they can detect them. But when the popup page happens to be a Registration page there is little to nothing they can do.
SimplyHired wants to be bought by Google. I suspect these pop-under shenanigans won’t increase the prospects of that happening.
My two cents:
SimplyHired integrated into the myspace search bar and the relationship with LinkedIn could be a big part of the jump, but their length of stay (1.18 minutes) and PV (1.6) per visit are both obvious casualties of these relationships with these problems further exacerbated by the rumored WhenU campaigns. I’m surprised they would even consider WhenU after landing what would seem to be strong traffic drivers. In the end, SH needs to provide employers with new potential employees for their business to succeed. It’s not a popularity contest, sooner or later, SH has to realize that the purpose of the site is to help people find jobs. Rumors have been swirling for months that Google was looking at SH, but I’m not to sure about that, since the word on the street is that the rumor was seeded by SH. What’s in it for Google?
This news doesn’t help their buy-out propects or does it? The big question is why sell now? Nervous? One hit wonders? Job board wannabees? Time will tell.
.
Can someone with knowledge of whenU please provide content for their wikipedia entry?
It needs help and I know nothing about them.
Oh, Conflict of interest with Edgeio?
the SH LinkedIN deal has been in place for more than 16 months so would have no bearing on the recent traffic surge.
Jobamatic has been a great success for SH and probably has been a key factor in the surge.
when is SH going to confirm / deny the WhenU allegations?
SH we are waiting
Drumroll please.
@ Michael Arrington
That kind of attitude is what killed newspapers. Be careful not to kill your golden goose – suckers like us who read TechCrunch. We already put up with Duncan Riley’s moronic reporting.
Hey Michael,
1 thing you forgot to check on alexa.com, the # of page views per visit, SimplyHired is 1.7, and Indeed’s is 6.1. One would think, the min. number of page views by a typical visitor would be atleat 2, the home page, and the search results page (that’s if you find something in top 10)…
I would say typos are a good thing, no typos means there were layers of people who edited…and who wants watered down, 5-day old reporting…
As someone who has bought pops from When U in the past, I can say that this is definitely a tactic to boost traffic #’s. Comscore, Netratings and others do a poor job of “filtering” this out of their #’s, but then again, their measurement criteria is flawed to begin with and should be taken as directional not literal.
Remember that the users who receive pop unders nowadays are those who downloaded screensavers, emoticons and other ridiculous free applications in the past. If you dont read the terms of service, that’s your own fault. Additionally, When U works pretty hard to make every pop under relevant to the searches you are already doing. Bottom line: if pops didn’t “work” for marketers they would be gone. Millions of people click and purchase through them. Sorry, it’s a reality.
From a marketing perspective, there are two ways using this tactic can benefit you: 1) cheap traffic and page views, 2) increased reach and brand impressions, trial of the site, etc.. There are also ways this can sabotage you: negative brand impact, more user complaints, etc.. Yes, it’s true, people hate advertising that’s intrusive, that’s not new.
Either way, it’s a brand decision. There are lots of cheap forms of advertising out there now through networks that make it easier to enter the online advertising game.
As a reformed popunder buyer and someone who is looking for quality impressions vs. quantity (this is hard to find), I now think that these CPA-based networks are causing the slow erosion of value from online advertising. Billions of wasted impressions are being served to the same people each month for products they are not interested in: mortgages, online dating, netflix (yes they use WhenU also). Remember X10 cameras? Smart marketers used to use frequency capping, day parting, demographic targeting and other qualifiers to make sure their ads were hitting a specific audience. Now, online, you can just blast your ad everywhere and as many times as is necessary until someone converts to your product at your set ROI metric. It’s easy and cheap, but also disturbing.
As for SimplyHired, they must have hired a direct marketing person and figured this trick out. More power to them. I wonder how the darling of the job search 2.0 category will fare in terms of brand perception?
As to the general problem of spyware-originating forced visit traffic: The comments above focus, reasonably, on one specific (alleged) instance. But I do think it’s worth noting the scope of the practice.
In “How Spyware-Driven Forced Visits Inflate Web Site Traffic Counts” (May 2007) ( http://www.bene...s/050707-1.html ) , I showed half a dozen specific examples. Frankly it wouldn’t be hard to document a dozen more. (If only I had the time.)
In my testing and in my observations, companies in intensely-competitive traffic-based businesses seem to be turning to these practices with growing regularity. I consider that unfortunate — in part because it pressures competitors to do the same, and in part because the net effects include 1) more popups and popunders, and 2) more money flowing to software users reasonably disfavor (e.g. for nonconsensual or misleading installations).
For anyone who is having trouble understanding the practices allegedly at issue, or the general problem of spyware-based forced visits, perhaps my article (and its video, screenshot, and packet-log documentation) can be of some assistance.
SimplyHired.com also publishes Job-a-matic which is a free job board service for companies. I use it, and I am sure many others do as well. This recent surge in traffic to that site (which the listings link to a simplyhired.com subdomain). Everyone wants a job board now a days – I dont doubt their traffic increase one bit. I know I have been a small part of it.
SimplyHired is a great service, but thanks for telling me about indeed.
A company that uses tricks probably has other problems. If their service was so valuable, they wouldn’t need them. I’ve always thought so many people try to “tell” a story instead of actually having one.