Vern and I were talking about Star Trek .. and he reminded me about that episode about the tribbles.. little furry animals that were cute and adorable, but kept multiplying and multiplying.. threatening life on the Enterprise.
Foolish comment from the misinformed here. Author suggests blocking domain name traffic, "implying" it is "garbage" and does not convert. Foolish comments are like Tribbles. They seem cute, harmless and well; foolish but sometimes they multiply.
I just had a chat yesterday with a guy trying to buy kneebraces.com from us. That chap wants to sell "knee braces". The guy runs "breastpumps.com" and told me (less than 24hrs ago) that the traffic to 'that name' converts Wayyyyy better than the traffic to his original SEO site "breastpumpsdirect.com"; which gets its traffic from Search Engine optimization under the keyword "breast pumps"... that is why he was trying to buy kneebraces.com from us.
The traffic to domain names is real. It comes from real people, through the address bar. IMO Findwhat.com ran into a different kind of trouble and significantly hurt their business when they lost their domain channel. Beginning late 2003, Yun Ye (who was with Findwhat) switched his traffic to Overture/Yahoo (you can see the crater on findwhat's [5 year] Alexa chart in late 2003). When Yun Ye left, many of the other domainers followed and in an effort to backfill the traffic supply they lost, Findwhat brought in assorted error search, downloads from third parties (you can see that on the chart in 2004 as traffic miraculously bounced back) .. Within two months you could go to Webmaster World and read about Findwhat: "What happened?.. all this traffic is total CRAP!" .. Some webmasters just don't know what they've got till its gone. Findwhat abandoned that unsustainable traffic and the chart again, presumably reflects that.
Don't take my word: for it "Direct navigation had a 4.2% conversion to sale rate, while search engine clicks lead on average to 2.3%." -- Susquehanna, August 2005
It's no surprise that companies like Net Shops and our breastpumps/kneebraces friend are out there beating the bushes for domain names and their traffic.
Last time I checked, Domain Sponsor marshalled millions of targeted type-in visitors. Yet the author I quoted suggests we all "keep it out" because it isn't Search? You're right dude: Type in traffic is often better than search. This is one 'tribble' I'd like to correct with the facts.
Speaking of foolish comments, check out this article about domain name selling:
"Domain Name Selling: Why it Shouldn`t Work"
http://webhosting.devshed.com/c/a/Web-Hosting-Articles/Domain-Name-Selling-Why-It-Shouldnt-Work/
***FS*** That guy is lost on every level. You are not going to be able to help every lost soul in the world and show them wisdom. Just do what you can. The biggest brands are gobbling up great generics right under this guys nose... food.com baby.com others are following with two word compound phrases: fireplacemantels.com Three words are next and it's still a dot-com world.
Posted by: DNCatalog | March 21, 2007 at 04:41 PM
Type-in traffic presents merchants who hold a "direct and immediate need" for a specific product or service.
While the same can be said of search, type-in traffic does not present the curiosity clicks and impressions that are typically associated with pure search. The pure need is much, much stronger hence the higher conversion rates.
The fact that this will never change is great news for our "industry".
***FS*** I should point out that Mike was co-founder of a fairly large paid search network so he is intimately familiar with both buy and sell side folks,.
Posted by: Michael Feeley | March 21, 2007 at 05:37 PM
If direct search works better, why do you think Richard Ball had such bad results from DomainSponsor? The blog post you linked to said the traffic wasn't converting, so what was the problem?
***FS*** Thats a very good question.. proof is in the pudding after all. I have two theories. A) some of the traffic wasn't coming from their domain channel (they manage ther types of content traffic, that traffic somehow bled through) .. and B) Type-in traffic is not a magic bullet / holy water - Not all keyword to advertiser strings match or perform better.. if the Oversee system was incorrectly sending non-matching intent traffic .. but over-all, the conversions are higher with type-in when implemented correctly. Most small webmasters have known that last statement for years.
Posted by: RobB | March 21, 2007 at 05:50 PM
Just me or does that blog seem just a little bit "keyword loaded" ? You probably could have done a trackback to get his attention btw.
***FS*** Its all about the type-ins dude .. i don't need publicity
Posted by: Adam | March 21, 2007 at 06:30 PM
I stopped reading that article (webhosting.devshed.com) half way through.....It was almost like he had some kind of hidden agenda to scare away people from buying generics so he can swoop in on them himself - that's the only reasonable explanation IMHO that comes to mind for writing that nonsense. Please keep spreading your gospel buddy - I would love it for prospective domain buyers to believe this! :)
Posted by: Gabe | March 21, 2007 at 07:26 PM
I knew I'd read that article elsewhere:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adwords-domain-parking-garbage-paid-search/4255/
I think that guy's A2z4Domain blog is a splog... he's just showing articles pulled from feeds to get people in to click his ads. It doesn't make sense to have an anti-Google Search Network post in the midst of the rest of his posts.
A bunch of the articles are from DomainNameWire.com among others.
***FS*** Ha ha "Love the net" .. I'm commenting on a robot.
Posted by: Russ Goodwin | March 21, 2007 at 11:33 PM
Our industry has one focus and one focus only:
Educate the public on the fact that finding what they want can be done just as easily or better by typing their query into their browser bar as a domain -- use whatever extension they want to experiment with.
Once the public "gets it", the business community will react and start purchasing keyword generic domains. That might be a good thing if you own the domains they need, but it might be a bad thing if they get them straight out of the basket, thereby eliminating a profit for those of us domainers who couldn't figure out that the millions of products and services that these companies offer are still available as keyword generic domains. REALLY.
GalvanizedSteelTubing.com
It's a product. A company will offer me a bid on that domain. It only costs me $35 for owning and controlling this domain for five years. You think in five years the mainstream business community will understand that owning their category killer domains is an extremely important marketing strategy for them?
These issues will be discussed at the http://www.domainroundtable.com in August. There are literally thousands of domains that domainers should be buying up right now, out of the basket, because soon the business community will understand that the PUBLIC will soon understand (*and B2B directors) that if a company has a product that can be defined generically as a domain, they better damn well own it before their competitors grab it.
This industry is like a FETUS. Lots of internal feeding going on while we're in the womb, but once the baby is born, and fed, and pampered, we domainers will be sitting bigger than any past domainer who had million dollar successes. Your 300 domain portfolio could be worth millions, if you know what you're doing.
Product/Service descriptive domains. That's the key. Why the hell am I giving this info away for free? I charge a lot of money for this information. I must be tired, or just happy to be posting on Frankie's board.
A new day is coming, and all of us will see the sunrise soon.
Stephen Douglas
Successful Domain Management™
DomainRelevance.com
"Own Your Competition™"
Executive Producer
Domain Roundtable Conference
NameIntelligence.com
***FS*** Thanks for the compliment and I totally agree .. what if you arbitraged every long-tail search query from the engines over to your longtail name? Could get interesting. Fabulous' lovely longtail name portfolio might be newly valuable.
Posted by: Stephen Douglas | March 22, 2007 at 05:46 AM
FYI, that splog scraped content from Search Engine Journal who blogged about my post. Here's the original post:
http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/blogger/2007/01/not-search-engine-spam.html
If you look at this particular situation from the point of view the advertiser, I think you'll see my frustration with Google. Facts:
1) Campaign had content network OFF
2) Spike in traffic came from searchportal.information.com
3) Traffic was worthless
4) Domain could not be blocked (site exclusion only works on content network)
It's about transparency. If Google only ran "AdSense for Domains" on their content network, this would not have been a problem. I could simply have blocked that particular domain. I'm not saying all parked domain traffic is bad. I'm saying this particular batch of traffic was bad and I had little choice but to throw the baby out with the bath water and turn off the entire search network to solve this problem.
I still think the real solution is to add a "domain network" to the choice of AdWords distribution options. Why does everyone seem to fear transparency?
***FS*** No fear here Richard.. I say take it out. Perhaps the fear lies at Google, domain traffic is a non-trivial clip of their revenue.. remove it and expose the wizard behind the curtain.
Posted by: Richard Ball | March 23, 2007 at 12:46 PM