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.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

3 COMMENTS

  1. I had made a lot during PPC boom 2002-2007 but now only one domain is at Parking Crew. Making $80-$100 a month easily. It is a low traffic name with high CPC.

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