Frequent readers of Domain Name Wire know that I park most of my domains at TrafficClub. TrafficClub optimizes your domains across a number of different parking services. Most traffic to date has been delivered to either Domain Sponsor or Google Adsense for Domains. TrafficClub just added Skenzo to the mix. Skenzo is unique by offering more than just pay-per-click ads. They provide pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, and affiliate ads. They have attractive landing pages as well (although I’m not convinced that attractive pages improve click through rates). Hopefully the addition of Skenzo will boost RPMs (revenue per thousand views).
Here are my November results at TrafficClub:
-$44.41 overall RPM
-Daily RPM fluctuated between $26.30 and $76.28
-Domain Sponsor untargeted landing pages $28.78 RPM
-Domain Sponsor targeted landing pages $39.03 RPM
-Google targeted landing pages $55.49 (almost all of the Google traffic is from one domain, which skews results.)
-Highest RPM for a single domain receiving over 100 visitors $370.39 (so each visitor is worth about 37 cents)
-Lowest RPM for a single domain receiving over 100 visitors $6.09
Bill says
Well-designed landing pages are critical!! And almost none of the parking companies understand this — DomainSponsor’s are particularly ugly. Skenzo’s are at least a big improvement, and I’ve switched my entire TrafficClub account to them. If there’s decent revenue being produced by bad page designs imagine what would be possible with really good designs– a LOT more revenue and clickthroughs– it’s just common sense. As an end user are you more likely ignore or close the window of an ugly, hard to read page? Absolutely! It’s human nature!. Good User Experience and clean design ultimately win– just ask Apple (re: the iPod) or Google (their clean, colorful, easy-to-use interface has been a major factor in their success; when they first launched this was a huge break from the other cluttered, ugly search pages like AltaVista). It’s time for domainer’s to demand better from these ignorant parking companies on behalf of our customers– the surfers who land on our pages and are looking for clear, intelligent connection to the information they are seeking. To all parking companies: Go STUDY Apple’s website to see what smart graphic design can look like!! http://www.Apple.com
Editor says
Bill, I used to agree 100% with what you’re saying. In fact I used to avoid DomainSponsor because of their poor landing pages. Google’s Adsense for Domains has rather plain pages as well. But time and time again DomainSponsor pulls in higher RPMs than companies with attractive landing pages, like ParkingSite and NameDrive. I suspect that eventually people will become accustomed to DomainSponsor’s landing pages and stop clicking on them. But click-throughs tend to be higher on domains with simple designs like DomainSponsor. I hope that more advanced designs will bring in higher revenue, but until then…