Keep an Eye on Your Traffic

For many years, domain name traffic was an important aspect of a domain name’s value. Domain names that had traffic could make serious amounts of revenue via parking, and that revenue gave additional value to a domain name beyond its intrinsic value. These days, traffic may be less critical to a domain name’s value, but I think it is a good idea to monitor it.

For almost a year, I have been forwarding 90% +/- of my domain portfolio to DAN.com landing pages. These domain names aren’t monetized with pay per click links as the goal is to sell the domain names. In essence, I am foregoing what I believe is a nominal amount of incremental revenue to make it clear that domain names are available for sale.

Yesterday, I was checking the traffic stats across my DAN portfolio, and I noticed TrackMyRefund.com had over 500 monthly views without any offers. This was up from around 300 views the prior month. I believe the traffic is related to US tax season, and people are likely seeking information about tax refunds. That’s just a guess because I do not see much in the way of prior development history with this domain name.

With this natural traffic, I decided to park the domain name at Uniregistry during tax season. There’s still a “for sale” link at the top in case someone is interested in buying the domain name, but now I am monetizing the traffic with PPC links. I just set this up today, so it’s too early to tell what kind of revenue this domain name could make during this tax period.

I picked up TrackMyRefund.com via pending delete auction on NameJet in January. It wasn’t super expensive, so perhaps it will earn its keep in PPC revenue. It was a good reminder to monitor traffic to better weigh whether or not to monetize domain names or forward them to “for sale” landers.