Hey there! It’s great to be back domaining again!
I’ve been super busy these last couple of years with the arrival of my two kids, hence my lack of posting on DomainPursuits.com!
I chose this particular post image because, oh boy, have I seen a lot of magnetic letters during my time away! This got me thinking… “I bet that’s a great product domain name to own!”, so I decided to see how it would fair if parked with one of my original templates containing some ads.
A quick look on Google’s Keyword Planner tells me that it could be a pretty sweet domain to hold in your portfolio with the intention of selling one day, regardless of monetizing it in some way in the meantime (if it wasn’t already registered that is…yes, of course I checked!).
The domain name ticks some of the boxes that I identified as being important to me on the back of the type-in traffic analysis I carried out a while back.
Monthly exact searches
This looked very nice on first inspection. However, since similar phrases are grouped together in Google’s planner these days (not very useful), I had to jump through the hoops and create a keyword plan to get a more accurate picture.
I did this by setting –
- Locations = US
- Match type = Exact match
- A custom date span from today to same day next year i.e. whole year from now (I prefer to smooth out high/low months by dividing by 12 afterwards)
- Max bid to highest possible in order to hog #1 spot (to get all impressions). I do this by entering 9999 into the bid at which point it tells me the max bid to set.
Running based on the above criteria returns 84k for whole year, so 7k monthly exact searches on average.
Type-in-traffic (potential)
It’s a 2 word domain and my analysis showed me that these descriptive domain names got 2.43% type-in traffic. However, the domain name has a length of 15 letters so falls into the 14-16 length category which only scored 0.60% for type-in traffic. So the lower of the two figures (0.60%) is the one I’d focus on here, because I’m keen not to over-estimate things. My analysis showed that the sweet-spot for type-in traffic in terms of domain length was between 11-13 letters (these got 2.69% type-in traffic).
CTR
As I have stepped through Google’s keyword plan it makes sense to use their CTR of 3.4% for my calculations.
CPC
Likewise, I’m going to use Google’s average CPC of £1.26.
So in summary it’s a bit of a mixed bag and using rough workings (based on the lower of the type-in traffic figures) I reckon it could potentially earn £21.59 per year as a parked site with ads.
I got to £21.59 by first multiplying the 7,000 US exacts by 0.60% (the type-in for 15 letter domains) then again by 3.4% (the CTR from Google’s plan). Next, I multiply that by the average CPC that the plan indicated (£1.26) before finally multiplying by 12 for the full year.
So the calculation in full is 7000 x 0.60% x 3.4% x 1.26 x 12 = 21.59
Based on my analysis and the current cost of £7 per year to hold a domain at my registrar, parking a name like this could result in an ROI of 2.1 which would be nice as it means I could make a profit whilst waiting to either sell/lease or develop into a minisite to increase revenue.
Since I’ve returned to domaining in recent months I’ve noticed some increased brutality from Google when it comes to ‘allowing’ me (or not!) to put their ads on one of my parked pages. They are far stricter now, which means I need to put a bit more effort into this or more likely focus solely on Amazon affiliate income from parked pages.
This is making my lean towards a slightly different approach which I’ll come onto in my next post.
Hope to see you there!
In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the intro post to my 4 part type-in traffic analysis then please be my guest!
image by Adi Respati
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