It appears that GoDaddy may be testing out not promoting .com domain names on its GoDaddy.com home page. First spotted in a tweet by George Kirikos yesterday, it appears that GoDaddy is continuing to test not promoting .com domain names, which seems unusual to me considering the vast majority of domain buyers are looking to buy .coms.
Here’s a look at the GoDaddy.com home page that I see:
GoDaddy is a company that is known to test everything – from special offers to creatives and everything in between. I am sure they are looking at sales and conversions with the current format.
I frequently see GoDaddy promoting very inexpensive .com registrations on its homepage. I think they look at .coms in these instances as loss leaders because people then buy hosting and other services with their inexpensively purchased .com domain names.
Perhaps the company is able to overcome any lost sales with greater revenue from the sale of new gTLD domain names. You can see that the cost of the new gTLD domain names is greater than .com in most instances, although we don’t know what GoDaddy actually pays the registry for these domain names.
GoDaddy does quite a bit of testing on a regular basis, so I highly doubt this is going to stay. I would imagine if 10 different people visited GoDaddy.com right now, there would be different testing taking places based on a multitude of factors, including location, previous visits (cookies), how they navigated to the website…etc.
It’s interesting to see these tests though.
“I would imagine if 10 different people visited GoDaddy.com right now, there would be different testing taking places based on a multitude of factors, including location, previous visits (cookies), how they navigated to the website…etc.”
Yep. I see a promotion for $2.99 .com domain names when I visit.
This is just great marketing. They make it look like you are getting a great deal when in reality they are still making money. The promotion is for one dot com at $2.99 but you must buy it for 2 years with the second year being $14.99. So by the time you check out you spent $17.98. Divide that by 2 years and you spent $8.99 per year to own the domain. Great marketing is all it is.
They have to try something to make a profit and eliminate those $800 million dollars worth of losses over the last few years.
Let’s not forget about Godaddy Premium Listings where they can take a 30% commission on .COM sales. True, many buyers are not willing to pay $XXXX for a domain name even if it is a short .COM but when they do, Godaddy does make a nice commission and even if the buyer settles for a three-word or hyphenated or abbreviated .COM alternative, Godaddy still can sell hosting and development services. How many non-domainers visiting Godaddy are really looking to buy a new TLD domain?
The internet landscape is changing and Godaddy is smart to test different landing pages.
I suspect a high number of people who try to find a .com name end up disappointed because of the lack of good available names. It makes sense to see if conversions are higher in different tld’s where the user is more likely to be able to register a good name.
In sales you have to sell what you have, not what the customer thinks they want.
GoDaddy should CUT the domains renew prices