SES: Let The Domain Drive

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

The Domaining & Address-Bar Driven Traffic session arrived in the wake of a couple of massive domain-oriented deals over the summer months.

Business.com sold for an eye-popping $350 million, making Answers.com’s Dictionary.com buy for $100 million look pedestrian.

Monte Cahn of Moniker said the whole domain market has been healthy, with 10.7 million domains registered just in the first quarter of 2007.

Entrepreneurs will want to keep some of the points made today in mind when building or rebuilding their online identities. Everything starts with the domain name. A natural, generic brand can lead to heavy search volume, and that equals mindshare with the prospective audience.

Go for clean, concise, and descriptive domains when building a portfolio. Revenue generating opportunities exist for CPC, CPA, CPM, or direct-traffic deals. The latter will want to choose from the most relevant domains, which makes Cahn’s suggestions important.

Jon Lisbin of Point It acknowledged a ‘dark side’ to domaining. He mentioned click fraud, cyber- and typo-squatting, and domain kiting or tasting as problems.

Andrew Beckman offered an interesting point about competition for traffic. Secondary search engines have been buying domains as a way to find quality traffic for their advertisers, as they strive to thrive in a Google dominated ad market.

In some ways, domaining provides a look at the future. Sean Moriarty of Yahoo Search Marketing said parked domains have been evolving, and becoming full-fledged Internet sites.

“September’s breach of the $3.00/gallon mark appears to be the tripping factor for the massive spike in searches on ‘gas prices,’ said general manager of research at Hitwise. “Even though we ventured into the $2.90s in the last few weeks, we experienced only a moderate increase in ‘gas price’ searches.”

The $2.90 per gallon mark, though, does set off a dramatic spike in searches for the term [hybrid]. The byproduct of that is good news for Toyota and Honda, two car manufacturers that offer hybrid automobiles. In April, Toyota’s website enjoyed a traffic increase of 42 percent overall while visits to Honda’s website increased by 19 percent.

The largest spike in traffic went to websites like Gas Price Alert and Gas Buddy, where visitors flocked by an increase of 432 percent and 417 percent respectively between April 1st and April 29th.

The pain at the pump also pushes interest in alternative energy. Hitwise says searches for the term [ethanol] were up 212 percent for the four weeks ending May 13th, and searches for [biodiesel] was up 100 percent. Tancer reasons that increased attention to ethanol as an alternate fuel source in 2006 has caused it to overtake biodiesel, which was more popular last September.

In April, the market share of visits to the government site FuelEconomy.gov were up 115 percent over March 2006, and visits to the American Coalition for Ethanol site and the US Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site were up 96 percent and 78 percent respectively.

The flipside of that, fewer people are searching for [SUV] and even [roadside motels] as the summer travel season begins.

“The majority of visits to the motel category occur during the summer months, yet as gas prices increase over the last several weeks, there is a noticeable decline in visits to the category,” said Tancer.

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