Which metric is more important, the number of people looking at a real estate website or the number of clicks? Australia's leading market research company believes the number of people actually going to these sites matters most, while the country's two biggest real estate portals remain in an ongoing war arguing about their traffic.

New data from Roy Morgan Research will no doubt inflame the tension between Australia’s two real estate listings giants as it showed more people view REA Group’s Realestate.com.au than Fairfax Media’s Domain. Roy Morgan's latest audience measurement data shows the total number of Australians visiting Realestate.com.au has grown 7 per cent in the past year, but the number visiting Domain has fallen 6 per cent. "We see that there are a number of metrics being quoted in the industry, and generally, they're traffic-based," Roy Morgan’s general manager of media Tim Martin told The Real Estate Conversation. "Our survey is a people-based measure. These numbers are not published to favor anyone, they are what they are. This was not commissioned by anyone, and we did not consult REA Group. Our view is we need to be looking at people-based measures rather than device or session-based measures. We think the right thing for the industry is to think of portals in terms of people."

Roy Morgan said that REA Group’s total audience numbers averaged 3.6 million in the second half of 2014 – up 7.1 per cent on the previous year. Website visitors rose 6.0 per cent to 3.5 million and app users rose 7.1 per cent to 773,000, according to the research group. Domain’s audience total audience fell 6.4 per cent to 1.7 million, with website visitors down 6.6 per cent to 1.6 million and app users down 15.4 per cent to 367,000.

Martin said the recent argy-bargy between REA and Domain over technical aspects of their website visitation numbers highlights just how muddy the waters have become for advertisers, agencies and investors needing a simple measurement of audiences. Martin said it was possible for audience numbers to fall even as traffic rises if those fewer visitors make more clicks.

Martin said the real estate industry might look at the portals differently to the way potential advertisers do. "The reality is there's always a mix (between measuring how many people go to a site, and how many clicks they make, generating traffic). I imagine if I was a real estate agent I might be interested in page views," he said.

The Roy Morgan report comes a week after Domain chief executive Antony Catalano threatened to report its rival to the regulator over "deceptive and misleading" performance comparisons, saying REA Group had falsely claimed to have made audience gains over Domain when announcing its half-yearly results earlier this month.