NameDrive Road Test - please discuss -

[Fishfinger]

Ed

I tried NameDrive, for a period of time, with the following:

2 domains with 5000 views per month (One high avg PPC, one low avg PPC)
3 domains with 1000 views per month (One high avg PPC, one low avg PPC, one foreign)

A clear pattern emerged:

Revenue increased for domains with low avg PPC - better revenue share - much better...

Revenue decreased for domains with high avg PPC - lower avg PPC - much lower...

CTR slightly increased for all.

This is my theory for the decrease in revenue of domains with high avg PPC's. People, feel free to discuss.

Out of 100 people visiting a parked page without related links:
- 80 will recognize a parked page and leave.
- 20 will click on the link that most closely matches what they are looking for - One of the ads -
At the end of the day --> 20x1.2 Euros = 22 Euros

Ou of 100 people visiting a parked page with related links:
- 60 will recognize a parked page and leave.
- 40 will click on the link that most closely matches what they are looking for - one of the related searches -
The second serving of ads isn't hand picked - the ads have a low avg PPC and sometimes are not very relevant - so :
- 15 leave.
- 25 click on an ad.
At the end of the day --> 25x0.132 = 3.3 Euros

Anybody else get the same results?

Don't get me wrong, I am delighted Name Drive is on the scene, but my portfolio is going to have to be split in two - Domains that benefit from related searches and domains that don't.

Surely, with the better revenue share, there is a way for NameDrive to always be on top!!!

 

[retired member 1]

Interested to see Ed's take on this.

I think I will always use more than one, I have a few domains that do so well with other parking services I daren't move them :wink:

I started my 2nd trial at 4pm last night, so far so good

 

[Nigel]

Hi Fishfinger,

Thanks for that very interesting info. I too think that computer generated related links are a real problem - often turning up totally unrelated and sometimes unsavoury results. All the PPC services are now going down this route though. Eg. this week I noticed one of my domains (not with Name Drive) turned up a 'Mr J Johnston' (who on earth is he?) as a related link - I think it was a job domain. Others (again not with Name Drive) produced porn sites (again from a job domain). Those type of results will only drive people from the site as they know immediately it has been hastily produced by a computer. I'm sure Ed will do all he can to resolve your problems - but a button to disable these 'related' searches would, be very useful, as would the ability to tailor your own related searches. Problem is there are too many dodgy domain owners who would abuse the ability to tailor there own searches. I've been in touch with Ed about this problem and he's been very helpful.

 

[Admin]

Interesting insight to your parking experiences, keep the information coming as we can all learn (and benefit) from this.

We we used to use urlportfolio.com - they had a "stop words" option where you could block search results from appearing such as porn etc. The trouble with this is that you put the obvious words in and then others still come up with no relevance at all to you domain "mercedes parts" springs to mind.

Not sure what the best solution is but certainly an easy option to block "adult" terms is essential.

 

[lesurf]

I have had an experience with NameDrive that is the exact reverse of FishFinger's. I have one name that I always knew had a much higher PPC rate than what sedo gave it credit for. This is going great guns with NameDrive - nearly $4.00 USD per click rather than the miserly 0.20 Euro cent I used to get with sedo.

My traffic domains that have low PPC values (as I just specify generic keywords like ringtones) were getting virtually the same or lower PPC values with NameDrive so I have left them with sedo, purely because sedo have the ability to accept offers and I can't be bothered to set up my own thingas I believe you need to with NameDrive.

My advice is see what Google are charging for an Adwords for your keyword related to your domain and then compare this with your PPC value you are getting. If there's a big difference then it is probably better to go with NameDrive IMO.

 

[NameDriver]

Morning Fishfinger, morning everyone,

Ed's (very long) thoughts:

A prominent member of this forum and the UK community, who was one of the first people to support us voiced a similar concern at the beginning of the last month.
I'll go through the ideal view, similar to my reply yesterday to Charlie's question:

If I type in boxedset.co.uk and get some 1-click ads, then Google sees this as a 'weak' search. Therefore the 1-click ads on the page are fairly low-paying. The reason behind this being Google's thinking "What boxed set is he looking for? A DVD boxed set? a collection of lead soldiers boxed set? a set of wine glasses?" You get the idea. For this reason, the advertising on 1-click pages generally pays less as Google believe it to be less targeted.

If I type in boxedset.co.uk and I get the same 1-click page with related searches and I click on one of the related searches, say, "Friends DVD Boxed Set", Google consider that a 'strong' search and therefore the next set of adverts to appear will be higher-paying than the first set on the 1-click, they know that I am looking for DVD boxed sets.

However...

When we first got our optimization in place at the beginning of September, I remember saying that I've never seen such fantastic optimization as it's so targeted.
Problem.
Too targeted.
So, we had the situation that we had FANTASTIC related searches but they were so targeted that, when clicked, they returned one or two, and in some cases, no ads whatsoever. This was obviously not an ideal situation. This meant, instead of having "DVDs" as a related search, a good, generic, high-paying related search, we had "DVD of the Friends episode with the one where Rachel finds a monkey in the bathroom". Which returned far fewer, lower-paying ads than we would have wished.

Now then. I've mentioned several times that we are currently looking into implementing new related searches for you guys. Not only that, but, before I start on our new related searches, I'd just like to say that our one-click solution is much much more solid than two weeks ago and far more reliable to return the sort of ads you're looking for.

I'd like to specify exactly what we are currently implementing with our related searches, but you never know who might be watching and I wouldn't like to reveal too much of our future policy before it becomes current policy and I can shout as much about it as I like.

What we are moving towards however is:
A new system whereby your 12 related searches will be made up of:
- high-paying, highly-searched generic terms in your domain name's topic area. - The most-searched, most-clicked terms moving to the top of the heap (already implemented). This has an adult filter to block any adult seraches appearing on your site. The filter has got stronger over the last week and we're happy to sacrifice some content to ensure there are no adult results thrown up on the page (e.g. If someone searches "MiddleSEX cricket team", it won't show up there. Sorry to any fans of the team).
- We are working to get the most-searched, most-clicked and highest-paid terms to the top of the heap.
- We'd also like a system whereby the RS can be entered manually by the users but, as I've said before, we wanted to do parking for "grown-ups", but we realise there are a lot of "children" out there.

While saying all of this, I think it's very important not to lose sight of how significant related searches are to a parked site. Across the parking board, they generally make up about 40% of the total clicks on a page and, if done right, will be your highest-paying part of the page, so we'd be unwilling to 'turn off' the related searches. If you look at a Domain Sponsor page, they don't even offer a one-click option, the whole page is practically a hunk of related searches. (Not that I'd recommend DS at all, of course.)
However, we are always happy to listen to anybody's feedback and, as I don't believe it would be a particularly tricky implementation, you never know, we may offer a 'disable' button.
In the back office, we currently have the ability to see, per region, which RS are being clicked on the most and it can be a very handy tool for future optimization - especially for sites you are having difficulty finding the right keyword. This will hopefully come into the member area in the not too distant future.

We've also been surprised by how successful the industry headers have been at increasing CTR, so we've got thirteen more on the way for you which should be here by next week.

We are on an upward curve, I feel. September was a great month for us as we could see that, even in our first month, we were competing with the big boys and we still have more up our sleeves, so thank you for the support, you lot in particular have been great. However, due to our unexpected meteoric rise in the US (which we didn't instigate, one forum post by a Brit was enough to send the world to NameDrive), we've been slower in implementing new options than we would have liked due to having to take more time on dealing with the masses.

This particular period of growing pains is hopefully over and, once we've made all our first payments successfully (obviously our next 'challenge'), we can make sure that the pages become even more lucrative than before.

J2theIZZO, great to see you're giving us another go, let's hope we can perform better this time.

I look forward to the ensuing discussion (with a slight feeling of trepidation...)

Ed

 

[NameDriver]

I don't want to go off topic here, but lesurf, if you want to sell your pages with ND, all you have to do is toggle the 'for sale' switch in the member area and the link comes up on the top right of the page (as you can see on my fantastic www.edytoedy.com domain) The link then takes you to a contact page. The difference to Sedo being threefold:
1 - We don't charge you any commission for the sale.
2 - You negotiate directly with the potential buyer, no need for anonymity - though you can do it through an ND rep if you wish, the potential buyers don't see your email address.
3 - We can't set up a 'minimum bid' option as Sedo do at the moment.

Right, back to topic...

Ed

 

[charlie]

I had written a long speal but it got wipped out when my session timed out!
will try again later!

 

[Fishfinger]

Ed

I am not knocking DS type pages, I have a number of high traffic domains parked there.

I guess what I am getting at, is that different type of domains will require a different type of landing pages to perform to their full potential.

Instead of trying to find "the perfect landing page", the solution might be to increase the number of options available to the domain owners.

 

[NameDriver]

No knocking taken

I know that every page has different requirements, which is why we offered the one-click/portal option straight up.

My point was really that, once our related searches are up to scratch, we will have a Sedo-style one-click, with high-paying, relevant RS as well as offering the option of a targeted DS-style page. I do agree that a page with poorly-performing related searches could well pull down the performance of our parked pages. By the same mark, a domain with good related searches can really boost every domain's earning potential. Now that we've improved our one-click performance, we're focusing on getting the related searches up to scratch.

Our pages are constantly going to change until we're happy with their performance and I'm sure that, in the future, we will offer a good many options for each domain. It is certainly what we are planning to do.

Ed

 

[Fishfinger]

All sounds very good, as per usual.

Until you can convince me with results tho, I am still with Nigel. A button to disable related searches, or at least switch them to generic popular searches when they are not getting good results, would be very useful.

 

[charlie]

heres an odd one
dreamstream.co.uk on sedo = September 2005 1,924 views
so far on namedrive 24 views
with 20 days left they're not going to be comparable at the end of the month - why the dramatic change or is this just coincidence?

 

[stevie]

heres an odd one
dreamstream.co.uk on sedo = September 2005 1,924 views
so far on namedrive 24 views
with 20 days left they're not going to be comparable at the end of the month - why the dramatic change or is this just coincidence?

have you chosen a different method for parking ie: like forwarding the domain rather than changing the nameservers?

changing nameservers is generally better for domains with lots of backlinks.. fowarding will only forward homepage traffic..

if you click this link from google http://money.dreamstream.co.uk/
it won't take you to your parked page unless you change nameservers..

 

[NameDriver]

It does seem strange, because I remember you saying a few weeks ago "let's see what they make out of my thousand monthly hits on dreamstream.co.uk.
Then I remember looking in your account and seeing that it was going to struggle to get into the hundreds, let alone thousands. Having Googled "dream stream" for UK pages, it'd seem that it's not exactly the most-often found term on the UK web so I'm surprised it got so many views on Sedo.
I suppose the acid test would be to move it back to Sedo (ach) to see if it still got that. The traffic does look like expired traffic - going down every day since it's been parked, but it doesn't seem to be an expired domain. I am stumped. More by the fact that Sedo showed such high traffic for a domain which seems like it should be getting the kind of traffic it's getting with us.
Is it a domain with a history? How long was it parked with Sedo?
How is the traffic on the rest of your domains looking?

Ed

 

[charlie]

I think stevie is on to something there. (many thanks stevie)

by checking on the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010402003924/http://dreamstream.co.uk/

it seems the site only ran for a year but did have a lot of content under sub domains.

I have changed the name servers now - we'll have to see if this makes any difference.

Ed
most of the other domains are new regs only at the moment - i was just testing with a few of my sedo names that never made any money for a start but i have been in contact with 123 about bulk changes

Many thanks all
will keep you informed

 

[Admin]

Charlie,

It seems your domain is part of a CGI script which may explain high traffic but low click throughs. Doesn't explain the Sedo ND difference though.

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache.../password/admin.cgi+"dreamstream.co.uk"&hl=en

search the script and you will your domain:
<td><form method="GET" action="http://forum.dreamstream.co.uk/">
<p><input src="$imagesrc/admin6.gif" name="submit" alt="Help Forum"
type="image"></p>

 

[charlie]

yeah but like stevie says links like
http://forum.dreamstream.co.uk/
wont get forwarded to the parking page - hopefully with the ns changes this will work?

according to domain name pro this site has 316 google links?

 

[charlie]

now i've chanaged the ns i get:
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.
is this just the delay?

 

[charlie]

ns servers have kicked in - but the keyword for the name had changed to "streaming" is this a ND suggestion - i've changed it back now but i'm willing to go with any suggestion?

 

[NameDriver]

I actually changed the keyword to 'streaming' yesterday as the ads seemed to be pretty good and the CTR for scripts didn't seem as high as it could be.
It's a tricky one. If you look up "dream stream" as a phrase in google.co.uk, then you get a whole load of stuff for fishing in Alaska, whereas, if you click on 'pages in the UK', then you get a lot of things about streaming radio and TV.
By using the 'Edit advertising regions' dropdown menu in the ND member area, you can see that a lot of the traffic is coming from the US, so it might be worth having "alaska fishing" as the North America keyword and "streaming" as the UK one?
I'd be interested to see if the DNS change ups the traffic to the same levels as before. Let's hope so and then we can really have a look at getting the best out of it.

Ed