NameMedia improves stats and landers for its three domain parking programs.
NameMedia, parent company of BuyDomains and Afternic, has released several improvements to its three domain name parking platforms: GoldKey, ActiveAudience, and SmartName.
The improvements span three areas:
1. Reporting – improvements to reduce timeout issues and site downtime and improvements to data discrepancy reporting. This includes a move to a new data center as well as database improvements.
2. Dashboard – what was once a convoluted mess is now a simple dashboard including recent revenue, portfolio snapshot, and best and worst performing domains. Beyond the dashboard, I still find NameMedia’s reporting systems to be more complicated than some of its competitors. A simple click to view the entire month’s stats by domain name would be a nice addition.
3. Landers – introduced seven new templates including localized search. The new templates include a configurable number of results.
There are few differences between NameMedia’s parking services as they all use the same platform. GoldKey is intended for newer and smaller domainers, whereas SmartName is an exclusive program for only the biggest domain portfolio owners.
I like NameMedia. And, always thought they would become one of the top 3 ppc companies.
Unfortunately, NameMedia had the worse reporting capability of all of the ppc companies.
It was like pulling teeth to get the dashboard to deliver the data.
Plus, the results always seemed less than the other guys.
I figured domainers were step-children. NM was primarily interested in their own domains.
I eventually moved away. And, like many others, my acct was canceled from inactivity last Fall/Winter. No loss.
Considering the whole ppc category is down, what difference does it make if they updated their back-office reporting.
I think it is just too late. The domainer is evolving into developers instead of passive domain owners.
Many domainers used NM hoping it would help to sell the domains thru NM’s sales dept.
I wish them well with the new upgrades.
Their landers keep freezing up my browser (firefox) loading up javascripts.
This is so silly from a domain parking company.
Who came up with this smart idea?? Who is in charge of optimization over there?!
Slower PC’s or ones that are full of plugins will really slow down due to this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they get rid of the javascripts after they read this post and realize that it is what was causing the CTR drops and bounce rates.
🙂
Best,
Mike
I found payouts to be very low with an occasional really high pay day.
Stats were very poor….came in late often and told you nothing really about your traffic.
I don’t have anything against NameMedia…I just figured them to have a rudimentary system that did not live up to expectations of this domainer.
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I have used Name Media’s parking platforms for several years as well as other parking services. While Name Media’s parking has had its ups and downs, especially lately, having a dedicated account manager to assist me with everything has made all the difference. If the stats are slow or unclear, my account manager has emailed the requested info in a timely fashion. Their payments are usually early and never have been late.
While their dashboard may not have performed as planned at times, it has been worth the wait because ActiveAudience and SmartName have unique features that enable customization not offered by others. The learning curve for new features is not bad and my account rep answers what I am unable to figure out.
At the same time, I am pleased to see Name Media is finally focused on upgrading their sites to provide even more options and save the domainer time. For the past couple of months, I have been allowed to use the new features and have seen increased click through rates for certain domains. The speed of the servers is drastically improved. They have more kinks to work out, but they are moving in the right direction. I am posting this, my first ever posting regarding domains, because I feel I should give credit where credit is due.
I’ve noticed that the parking pages with NameMedia landers all include some google anylitics code for their anylitics account. Im not sure I want google having info on all my domains. I generally try to share as little with Google as possible. Perhaps NameMedia was using anylitics to double check their own stats system.