Pharmacy uses variant of famous DomainSponsor slogan.

I came across a funny tweet this morning by @superberg: “Oh no! Domain squatters have taken over CVS!” with a link to this picture:

Apparently @superberg snapped this photo at a CVS pharmacy, and it reminded him of the slogan domain parking company DomainSponsor made famous. DomainSponsor’s slogan is actually a bit different, substituting “need” instead of “want”:

But it’s good for a laugh, anyway.

Oversee.net, parent company of DomainSponsor, has filed a trademark for its “What you need, when you need it” slogan. The trademark examiner seems to be giving the company a hard time over proving the slogan has been used in commerce and its description of classes of service. But even if it had an identical trademark to the term at CVS, the pharmacy chain has nothing to worry about…I doubt DomainSponsor will add the trademark class for ‘food’.

Easy-to-build online stores provide alternative to standard domain name parking.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned SmartName Shops, a unique parking template available to SmartName customers. The system has been available for a while on SmartName, but is now available by request on NameMedia’s other parking platforms including ActiveAudience and Goldkey.

SmartName Shops are pay-per-click based templates that include an e-commerce product feed from Shopping.com. They provide a good alternative to standard parking pages on domains that have an e-commerce connotation. Even more important - SmartName makes them very easy to set up.

Creating a shop basically involves adding your domain name as usual, selecting an e-commerce template (one is available and another on the way soon), and choosing your category keywords. For example, I set up EverythingDogs.com in about 3 minutes. The tabs at the top represent my keywords.

This example is basic and you can customize your shop fairly easily. SEO features are rich, allowing you to add custom text and change your meta tags. You can also upload a custom header. An example of a well developed Shop (owned by NameMedia) is YellowDress.com.

SmartName Shops provide a great alternative for domains that either don’t perform well as standard parked pages or lend themselves to an e-commerce site. Getting a SmartName account is very difficult, but users of ActiveAudience and Goldkey can contact their account manager to activate shops on those programs.

Data from an advertising campaign shows that parked domains can convert better than search ads.

It’s been about 9 months since I last wrote about how I was getting better conversions from parked domain ads than Google search. Now that I have a lot more data, it’s time to update the stats.

As background, I own a college funds site that offers a free report about mistakes to avoid when setting up a 529 plan. I purchase ads on Google Adwords that direct users to a landing page specifically about the report, and track conversions on the back end.

So far the campaign has served over 4 million impressions and delivered over 30,000 clicks across Google search, the content network, error pages, and parked pages. The most cost effective channel: parked domains.

Here are the stats, ranked by conversion rate:

(Note: Parked pages and error pages are removed from content channel stats.)

You’ll notice that, not only does the parked domain channel have the highest conversion rate, but it also has the lowest cost per conversion. Google Search (which does not include the search network) has by far the lowest conversion rate, and its cost per conversion is worse than both the parking channel and content channel.

It doesn’t appear that smart pricing is the reason for this difference in cost per conversion. In fact, I’m paying about 2 cents more per click on parked pages than I’m paying on Google search.

This is just one example, but it’s proof that search marketers who don’t show ads on parked pages are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you hire someone to manage your online advertising and they say you should opt out of parked pages, that probably means the manager just isn’t good at optimizing your ad and ad placement.

Apps let you check stats on all three NameMedia platforms.

On Monday Cortnee Gunn, a NameMedia domain parking account manager based in Austin, stopped by my office to show me the company’s latest parking innovations.

If it seemed that NameMedia and its parking companies — GoldKey, ActiveAudience, and Smartname — fell off the earth for a while, that’s because the company was dealing with its initial public offering quiet period. With the IPO called off, the company has been more visible over recent months.

The company recently released iPhone apps for all three of its parking platforms. The iPhone apps let you quickly see daily and monthly stats, portfolios, top and bottom performing domains, and other content. I played around with the app for SmartName, and it is slick.

SmartName Shops, which are easily created pay-per-click ecommerce sites, are picking up steam. Check out YellowDress.com for an example. These shops are now available to some customers on all three of the company’s platforms (contact your account manager for details). I’ll have more information on Shops in the next couple weeks after I experiment more with it.

Rate and review domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Could move foreshadow image ads on parked pages?

Today Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that it will start adding relevant banner ads to the bottom of link ad results pages.

Link ads are part of the Google Adsense program. Instead of showing ads that link directly to an advertiser’s site, a link unit includes keywords that link to a page full of Google ads.

The banners are shown at the bottom of these ad pages:

Google says that it found revenue increases when adding the image ads, which means that a combination of text and image ads produces higher revenue than text ads alone. That begs the question, will this soon be applied to parked domain names, too?

Google Adsense for Domains uses pages that look very similar to link unit results pages. It will also be interesting to see if Google starts to syndicate its image ads to it partner parking companies. Google restricts which types of ads these partners can show, but it may wish to insert its own image ads to boost overall revenue.