What is parked domains ‘type-in traffic’ and what are the chances of converting these hits into actual customers?
If your a brand owner who uses a domain name management company you have probably been sent a data rich spreadsheet outlining the reasons why your domain name portfolio is a gold mine of possible customers waiting to give you their money by activating your parked domain name portfolio. I was always a little dubious of this concept because type in traffic is on the decline with the rise of google and intuitive new browsers and some of the statistics I was seeing on type in traffic just didn’t look right.
This prompted me to dig into some of the recommendations that was sent to a prospect of mine and together we reviewed the recommendations against the domain names actual traffic. While the assessed query count in some cases was close to the actual query count, what we discovered was that the actual traffic mostly consisted of either bots or internal DNS queries where certain zones files have been set up.
What is a real parked domain name opportunity?
Often your competitors will decommission promotional websites and in the process not renew the associated domain name. These websites sometimes still generate descent traffic and if snapped up can be a legitimate source of traffic/customers for you and a loss for your competitor.
You can run monitors on your competitors domain name assets and screen for dropped domain names with website properties on them (a simple DNS monitor will suffice). There are plenty of traffic research tools such as SE Ranking that will let you know roughly how many hits a site is getting to give you a starting point where a site is worth monitoring or not.
Renew or let go?
While you may not make increase your traffic with parked domain names they do serve a very real brand protection purpose. Often brand owner hold domain names in countries they plan to one day operate or countries where cyber-squatting is rife.
Common typos are also parked and not used to stop scammers from registering these domain names and running phishing scams from quickly deployed scam sites.
A strong domain name portfolio consists of your core brands in the .com, relevant ccTLD such as the .com.au and relevant new gTLDs. For example, if I am operating My Parked Domains limited in Australia and am targeting the Australian and New Zealand markets I might consider the following domain name registrations:
- myparkeddomains.com – the .com gives a brand global reach
- myparkeddomains.com.au – the .com.au is the most trusted domain name in Australia
- myparkeddomains.net.au – the .net.au for brand protection purposes
- myparkeddmoains.co.nz – the .com.nz is the most trusted domain name in New Zealand
- myparkeddomains.nz – the .nz for brand protection purposes
- myparked.domains – initially I would recommend reserving this new gtld for brand protection purposes, but could use it for a market opportunity down the track
- myparkeddomains.cn & .com.cn to protect your brand from Chinese cybersquatters
Typos I would recommend considering would be myparkedomains (on “d” missing) in the .com, .com.au and .co.nz domain name spaces.
Re-directing parked domain names
I always recommend redirecting your parked domain names, especially your ccTLDs to your operational website because in many countries, such as Australia, they trust the .com.au domain name space over every otyher spacem, including the .com. This is because the .AU domain name space is highly regulated by auDA, Australia’s domain name governing body. If a foreign entity wants to engage with Australian consumers they need a .com.au domain name to engender trust. The same applies for New Zealand (.co.nz), Singapore (.sg), China (.com.cn). Simply redirecting these ccTLDs to your core website will greatly help facilitate that trust process with local consumers.
About brandsec
Brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that look after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.