by Craig Rowe
There are a variety of opinions in the domain industry about the effectiveness of non-traditional domain monetization platforms, such as WhyPark, Epik, and SmartName content portals. There are just as many terms for it, whether it’s mass development, mini site development, enhanced parking, etc. We typically call WhyPark a domain monetization or domain development platform. We make tools to help you make money from your domain names, regardless of how we’re labeled.
A common complaint about any developed site, whether it’s fully custom or through a platform like ours, is that your Click-Through Rate (CTR) will decrease compared to Parking. I see the concern on forums, at conferences, and in blogs. In some cases it’s true that it will decrease since there are other options for a visitor than clicking only on sponsored listings. In other cases, it’s not. We have numerous domains on WhyPark with CTR’s consistently at or above 100%. It doesn’t mean that every single person is clicking on a link, but rather that the ratio of clicks to visitors is basically 1 to 1. Like anything, the CTR depends on the domain, the level of customization, the market being served, and other factors.
What surprises me is how little attention is paid to more important metrics like revenue and opportunity cost. Plain and simple, are you making more money with your content site than you were with parking? Are you getting a return on your time investment or would you have made more money by putting those efforts into something else? We lower the barrier by making our platform free and easy to use. If you want to dump 10,000 domains into our bulk add form, hit submit and walk away, then your cost is pretty low. At that point, you can watch your revenue reports and see if you’re making more money on your domain portfolio than you were before. We still optimize on your behalf with technology and people as well.
Coming back to the title of this post, “You Can’t Buy Beer with CTRâ€â€¦ clicks, CTR, searches, RPC (revenue per click), page views, and visitors are all fairly traditional domain monetization metrics. They’re nice for figuring out where you could potentially improve and how domains perform relative to others. If your CTR is low, it could be that you or we have not targeted the theme of your site to what your visitors are expecting. It could also be that they’re engaged with your site and finding what they came for without clicking on ads. Ultimately though, the only metric that you can use to pay bills, send your kids to college, or buy a much needed twelve pack of beer is REVENUE. It’s the metric that will actually make a difference in your life. So, when we hear that CTR has decreased compared to where their domains were previously, my question is always how their revenue looks today compared to the previous platform. It’s all that really matters.
Take for instance a domain that was added to our platform in July. This is not what I’d call a typical trend when someone adds a domain to WhyPark, and it’s pretty exceptional really. The domain was added, a few pages of custom content were added by the customer and then he also added the following domain apps: web directory, Twitter, shopping and videos. The video app has really been the key app driving the growth of the site. About 95% of the traffic is from organic search (Google, Yahoo and Bing). This is a domain that was previously parked with a large competitor making $5 – $8 per day. Each day since being added to WhyPark, the traffic and revenue has grown from that initial $5 to $130 yesterday. Yes, the CTR on this site sucks; it’s about 3%. But which would you rather have; a domain making $5 per day with a 75% CTR or a domain making $130 per day with a 3% CTR? Yes, we’re always looking at ways to push more people to click on ads and boost the CTR and revenue even further. However, this revenue growth wouldn’t be possible without the user engagement and Domain Apps being added to the site. The time spent to launch this domain was less than 30 minutes and the cost was free. WhyPark is clearly a better option for this particular domain.
WhyPark operates on a revenue share with no upfront fees. (Some other services charge upfront fees; others don’t.) Since we don’t make money unless you do, it’s in the best interest of WhyPark to continue to innovate and perform on behalf of our customers. In some cases parking may be a better fit for your domains. In some cases, it might be a mixture of custom development, WhyPark, and parking. Regardless of the platform you use, the only comparison and metric that matters is revenue.
Craig Rowe is founder of WhyPark, which is now owned by Parked.com.
Leonard Britt says
CTR declines are primarily an issue for premium .COM domains with lots of type-in traffic. Oftentimes a .Net domain will get zero type-in but could still get ample traffic if developed. So then the comparison is nearly zero traffic versus some traffic and a low CTR. The key is how much development will it take for that site to rank because if it doesn’t rank, then CTR is irrelevant.
Craig Rowe says
With domains that are already receiving a lot of type-in traffic, you can still build greater revenue through additional traffic coming from new sources. It’s like you said, it just depends on what that time period is to build new traffic, if there are decreases in revenue during that time and what the overall revenue lift is ultimately and ongoing.
We find that the truly premium domains get an excellent CTR either way though, because the keywords are so targeted and there’s really good advertiser coverage there from well-established brands.
Craig
Craig Rowe says
Meyer – When I started reading the first sentence I was getting a bit nervous. Damn, you REALLY hated the post.
Stephen Douglas says
Craig is THE premier domain revenue genius in our industry.
Period.
(no, buddy, you don’t have to send me an 18 year old Ballantines — *cough*, but it would be a nice Xmas present! Signed, of course)
For those reading, I’m no longer working at WP, but I am moving hundreds of my domains there. They work exceptional when you want to offer up a domain for sale to an end user. Nothing gets them worried more than a nice little website that took you 5 minutes to set up. Your potential buyer sees how the domain they should own, would look if their competitor owned it.
That’s just a small fraction of the benefits of using Whypark. I wish I could put my WP ref code here, but it’s Dub-A’s guest article.
Truly, every domainer MUST have a Whypark account and move their non-PPC performing domains there.
Mike - DomainAnimal says
i would love to know the domain that went from nothing to 2.3 million visitors per month. in fact, i would pay to know it
MikeZ - Domaininator says
Great post Craig.
After much consideration, I’ve just started with the Enhanced plan with WhyPark and am very pleased with it. WhyPark provides alot of value added service for developing a domain. If you would like to check out what I am up to you can take a look at HighInterestBankAccount.us I’m working on the custom content at the moment, but you can get the idea.
Your article gave an example of an established domain that was already receiving some type in traffic. I’m wondering if you have any stats or examples on new domains that are keyword rich, but not receiving any traffic. Are domain owners able to develop/increase traffic by developing with WhyPark? If so, what examples do you have and what are they doing to accomplish this?
Any comments would be appreciated, and thanks for the post.
MikeZ
Meyer says
Quote –
“every domainer MUST have a Whypark account and move their non-PPC performing domains there.”
Considering how poorly ppc has become over
the past 2 yrs, that would be all of the domains.
🙂
Bernard says
You can’t buy a product with such an example.
You should be able to show statistical results with your large customer (or a least domain) base.