The cold war against direct navigation
The war is on. You might not have noticed it, but the search engines want the direct navigation traffic back, since participating in via the Domain Channel is not enough for them. I would imagine that it might even surprise them a little that direct navigation traffic is increasing. I’ve always wondered why the search companies are not buying domain names on their own.
While I might not always agree with Richard Ball, I enjoy reading his blog and his latest post is once more of interest to Domain Investors.
We often focus on Direct Navigation/Type-In traffic (i.e. people that type the domain name directly in the browser URL bar), but any websites may also lose traffic where users type a domain name directly into a search engine. In the past Google used to show the domain name itself as the first result, but this behaviour has changed. It’s no surprise that Google does not index PPC parked domains, but at least the traffic would come to you, when someone entered the complete domain name.
Richard used the term and domain “NoMoreAllnighters.com” (which is part of a FedEx Kinkos campaign, and confirms the trend for companies to use “slogan domains”) as an example. The domain was only registered on February 21st, 2007, not too much in advance of the beginning of the campaign. By now the domain and site are indexed by Google, but when Richard ran his test, a search for the domain in Google yielded no results at all. So Richard ran a PPC test for the last week of March, using the domain name as the keyword. And guess what, there where 203 searches on Google for the domain that never got to the real Kinko website.
So to closer investigate how search engines deal with searches for domains, I used “cameras.com” as a search term. The domain was sold in the TRAFFIC auction last October. The name used to have a real website, but is now parked with parked.com. Let’s start with Google:
So the top search result for “cameras.com” is “digital-cameras.com“. Also note the advertisement on the right, citing the term “cameras.com”, when it’s not really the advertiser’s domain. In the past, “cameras.com” would have been the top result.
What about the other search engines? Let’s try Yahoo!:
Interestingly enough, camera.com is listed as the top result, however the listed appears to be the page before it was parked. Keep in mind that it’s been parked for about 3 months, so the data seems stale.
Let’s try MSN live.com:
It appears that live.com also is using some older data for their results, but in any case, the domain itself is still listed at the top. When you do a search for a domain that has been parked for a longer period of time, you will see that live.com simply removes those from their index, so apparently their fight is not just against CyberSquatters.
Google is also employing other means by allowing their advertisers to advertise on other media, such as satellite TV ads and even benchads. And the ads do not simply point to the advertisers, but rather say “Google X”, with X being the keyword that brings you to the advertiser’s website. It’s all about increasing search engine traffic, even if it means subsidizing ads.
So the question is: How much traffic are you losing to Direct Navigation searches in search engines, and should you be placing ads for some of your domains? Would this be considered arbitrage?
I like this post on Frank Michlick’s blog.. It speaks to valid points that all “direct navigation” operators have seen for a while… and it’s a very catchy title Frank
[...]
Google changed the way they handle url queries in early September 2006 and surprisingly the change did not draw much comment.
Before then they used to return a page with:
If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link http://www.cameras.com
Their reason for making the change was for improving user experience especially for typos, however it also had the effect of showing users Adword adverts rather than the adverts on each domain.
Recently they have adjusted the returned search pages for url queries so that (provided the pages are in their index) the actual url will rank 1st. i.e. above pages which would normally be ranked higher for relevancy by their algorithm.
I havent measured it but I would guess having a search box as in IE7 will have more effect on direct navigation long term, as users come to realise they can type in bits of urls (even with some mistakes) into the search box and most of the time still get to where they think they want to be in a way thats quicker than using the address bar.
Hi Frank. I enjoy reading your blogs, too.
I don’t believe Google used to display AdWords ads on domain searches. It is a peculiar change. It does create a need for domain name reputation management, don’t you think?
BTW, I would like to point out that I’m not “against” parked domains. When I manage PPC accounts, whether on Google or Yahoo, I like to keep the search advertising separate from the contextual advertising. Having parked domain traffic show up in both categories makes it difficult to adequately track results. My frustration, then, is with the search engines themselves and how they distribute ads. Seems to me that creating a separate network, a “domain network” for Google AdWords and a “domain match” for Yahoo! Search Marketing would be the way to go. A little more transparency is in order. I actually have a decent amount of respect for domainers. You’d be amazed how many in the SEO/M field read domainers’ blogs.
Anyway, thanks for the link and the well researched post. I’m a DomainEditorial.com subscriber.
Richard, thanks for the kind words. I did not mean to imply that you are part of the “cold war” – basically this war is about the dependence of the domain industry on yahoo and google, when yahoo and google try to gain their independence. Development and direct advertiser relationships seem to be the way out of this.
It is actually in Google and Yahoo’s best interest not to expose the size of this channel and the channel itself to their advertisers, because if the advertisers were aware of the existence, I could imagine that some of them would go directly to domainers and the domain channel.
Richard, what I would really like to hear more about is why you have experienced bad conversion rates from the domain channel. Are you able to share any details and comparison from individual compaigns, or have you done so and I just missed it?
I can only imagine how powerful the SEO crowd and the domainers could be, if only they worked a little closer together.
/Frank
This type of traffic, where some inputs the domain name into the search engine instead of directly into the browser bar, for my generic type-in domains, represents 1-2% of my traffic (looking at referrers).
John, I wonder how much it was before the Google change. Do you have any numbers for that as well?
/Frank
[...] ParkedNames issued this short statement: “Yahoo! and Google do not see the value in domain traffic and are making a slow but certain move away from supporting domain monetization.” If you consider the termination of Klickerz by Skenzo (which mainly uses a Google feed) and the earlier split between DomainSponsor and TrafficClub (TrafficClub was sharing DomainSponsor’s feed), this might just be a sign of the times to come (the cold war against domain traffic). [...]