A NameDrive Tutorial

[NameDriver]

Welcome to the NameDrive mini tutorial.

Please read my other post first if you stumble on this one wide-eyed and unaware of why you're here.
http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/thread1972.html

First things first:

- We sorted out issues with UK-style Post Codes in the address field but, as Grant points out, it seems there are still some issues in the bank details area. It is not necessary to set up a payout ID yet (you can just leave it as 'choose payout method'. All you need to sign up is 'email' 'password' 'first name' 'second name' 'contact telephone'. Add domains and you're away...

- Our DNS servers are brand new and are still learning how to be parking servers. We would most recommend using URL forwarding for now. The URL is www.ndparking.com/yourdomain.com with DNS forwarding hopefully kicking in for good in the next 24 hours.

- One issue I know you'll ask me about is your revenue stats. They work like this: Due to the increase in click fraud on parked pages etc., traffic is filtered for the first 48 hours. For this time, we show a generic click price. Once the 48 hour period is over, you will see the real earnings on your domains. This may all sound a bit dodgy, but I want to reassure you that this is in no way a ruse. We aim for 100% transparrancy and, while we are unwilling to give out our exact payout percentage (for reasons already discussed), we will pay out an extremely competitive commission on every cent your domains earn. This means that, depending on visitors' behaviour, the same domain with the same keyword may some days get $ 0.10 and other days $0.50 per click. We even had one guy with a $4 last week! - not that I want to set any sort of precedent... This is the way the PPC world works and we don't believe in just assigning generic click prices to keywords, we prefer to show exactly what your domains earn - effectively leaving the top limit for each click price open.

- Optimizing with NameDrive is different to what you are probably used to. Here's how it works:
We have carried out extensive tests and it has become clear that the most important part of a parked page are the related searches. That's why you'll find ours on the top left, the most clickable part of a parked page.
The one-click part of our parked pages is generated directly from Google while we allow users to optimize the related searches:
This leaves two ways to park with us:
Firstly, if you have a name that is easily categorised by google, such as 'html.co.uk', then park it with us, select 'one-click' for the ad type, optimize those related searches and wait for people to click like crazy on the perfect parked page.
Secondly, if your name is not easily recognised by Google 'Where-is-London-on-the-map.co.uk', then we would suggest putting the ads to 'two-click', optimize those related searches and... hang on, the CTR is still amazingly high.
This is because internet users can't seem to get enough of our portals. You may think they look a bit dull, but we are seeing general CTRs over our portals with optimized related searches that you would normally expect to see on a optimized one-click.

I'll leave you to discuss the merits of optimization. I have to say that, unless you're sure that the one-click ads are perfect on your domains, then stick everything on a two-click page, optimize the related searches, and see how well the revenue does.

- We currently don't have the industry headers that we promised for your parked pages. At the moment, we can only offer the most competitive parking program in the UK. Sorry. We will hopefully have the headers available in 7 days.

That ends the lesson for today. Let me know, either here or by email if you have any further questions.

Have fun and I look forward to your feedback.

Ed

 

[Edwin]

Just to follow up on the "48 hours adjustment" part of the above, it really does work well, though it takes a bit of getting used to. For the first couple of days all your results will (likely) look pretty low as ND is plugging in a generic per-click value, then whooosh the real numbers get retroactively applied and it's time to start smiling again.

You'll easily see when the real numbers come in because the per click won't be a nice round number any more

The real lesson is to plan for and allow the lag to work its way through the system. In other words, plan to test a domain for at least 4-5 days so that you can see the click pricing dropping into place.

 

[NameDriver]

Morning everybody.

As promised, the DNS is now up and running. All names that were forwarded that way will now be working perfectly...

Laskos: I did get your email thanks. I did promise the option of putting a 'for sale' sign on your sites and we are aiming to put it live in the next 24 hours.

I know that there is a lot of 'we will' coming out of here, but I'd like to say that NameDrive is currently one day old and we are just beginning to pick up pace. We have a lot of features that will be coming online in the next weeks - these are features that are 90% ready and need one more tweak before implementing it into the real system.

As I said yesterday, we currently offer what is on the market but better: namely, an extremely competitive parking program (we have people on the German forums reporting double the payouts they're normally getting). In the very near future, this competitive parking program will expand to offer features which are currently not available elsewhere.

We are hoping to go at a rate of one significant addition per day for the next 7 days. It may be aiming big, but that is what we are looking to do. Yesterday was concentrating on bugs (DNS, bank, etc.) now we want to concentrate on implementation.

Thanks for your patience, let me know by email if there's anything I can do for you.

Ed