PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[ZOX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[Donny]

cybermonkey - It hasn't been 4 days, you submitted something on Friday and your account manager was out of the office on Friday.

It seems to me that all of your domains are only getting hits from spiders. In about 15 minutes you should have a hit and that's from me.

We don't show hits from Spiders like some other parking companies do, because we don't consider a spider to be a real visitor.

Donny

 

[Varon]

Parked.com Tips

Do you parked.com experts have any tips on getting a better CTR? I'll take any thoughts on this.

Firstly, I'm not an expert on parked.com, but I'm learning a bit. Let me summarize what can be done at Parked.com.

Opportunity lies in the eyes of the beholder. I understand that there are limitations on customizing a parked page. However, its best to always work within limitations and make the best use of available resources.

Here are a few tips that can help you monetize your parked domains better.

1. The minute you sign up and transfer your domain to parked.com, don't lose time in writing a keyword rich title and meta description. If you don't you might end up getting the standard description with some KW's mentioned. I noticed that all my domains on parked.com are getting indexed super fast on Google. Parked allows you to enter a meta description 128 characters long. Make sure to use as much of this as possible. For finding good low competing high occurence keywords, please reference wordtracker or any other appropriate KW research program. By doing this, you are also ensuring that you might be able to tap some traffic from search engines too. Why waste this great opportunity?


2. Use the right keyword. Try researching a bit and you will definitely come up with a good keyword. For example, if you are targeting debt consolidation, make a list of various similar keywords, i.e

a)Consolidating Debt
b)Debt Consolidation
c)Bad Credit Debt Consolidation

Now, each KW pulls up different related KW's on both the 1CL/2CL (CL=Click Lander). For example, here is how the parked.com KW system works with ref to a 2CL. The total related KW links pulled up are 23.

If my KW is Debt Consolidation, the top header would break up into 6 related links. In this case, the main KW links would be

1) Debt Consolidation
2) Credit Card Management
3) Consolidation Credit
4) Credit Information
5) Loan Processing
6) Consolidation

Now again, Debt Consolidation breaks up into 10 links of which 5 KW's are pulled up from the header. So its 5 new KW links. Later item 2-4 are broken up into 4 links each totalling 12.

In short, we have 23 KW's, each associated with different CPC's. Now, the way to go about this would be to experiment with each KW and see what 23 links it pulls up. On an advanced level, I would even delve deeper to make sure that all the 23 links have decent CPC payoffs. But that is going a bit too far.

It would be best to try 1 keyword every 10 days and make a note of its resulting payoffs. This also helps the system get real, rather than historic values for your domain, based on actual yahoo payoffs. So, at the end of the 10 day test period, you know exactly what benchmark CPC that keyword is going to pay you.

Now you can rotate your 3 major keywords each over 10 days. At the end of the 1st month, you know what works best for you. Thats your KW to target.

3. During this testing stage, try working on your landers. Use pleasant web safe colors. To find what web safe colors are, just run a Yahoo/Google search and you should find substantial stuff.

Give your domain a short decent title like "the best payday loans" etc. Try using a friendly non controversial human face on your domain. Visitors get interested looking at a picture. You could also use related cartoons on certain serious themes to gain attention and break down the monotony. Like for example, if you have some cartoon depicting some funny words related to loans, you might get people to stay on and maybe explore your site links.

What I mean is, try whatever seems novel to you. You could hit up with a great picture that grabs people's attention. In some cases however, a human picture might not be appropriate. For example, a medical equipment, like an ECG machine. Here you might want to actually show an ECG machine. Think right and you will get things right.

4) Try different template and color combinations and make a note of your CTR. This gives you an idea of which templates work best. For example, if your domain is related to sports cars and speed vehicles, you may want to use vibrant red shades catering to a vastly younger audience.

5) If you are running a campaign, make effective use of keywords in your ad. This holds significance esp for your title line. Give a call to action. Words like New, Discover, Limited Time, Free etc are proven attention grabbers. Read up on some top advertising keywords which help you create good conversions. You and Only You can make or break your campaign with words. So use them well and you will succeed.

For those who think domaining is easy... ah.. its a nightmare. Its more like a full time job with extreme dedication.

 

[Seabass]

There is NO doubt something MAJOR is going on with earnings and lower reported traffic from Google and Yahoo

How many of us here know a foreign language, other than English?

I know many, many of you guys and gals do speak other languages - just look at the names. I speak three languages also, and three others I understand and can speak brokenly.

How hard would it be, for example, to get a group of guys/gals in Brazil to knock out mini-sites for us, especially if we brought consistent, volume work? Brazil is loaded with talented programmers, an educated population, that is underemployed ( I know a Brazilian banker here in the U.S. cleaning houses, for example, b/c of no work in Brazil). They would LOVE the work.

Andrew over at DomainNameWire.com said that he has turned $1 a day parked domains into $15 a day using XsitePro to develop out the domains. He even gives site examples and the example pages suck in appearance, but they make him $15 a day. Here's a link to the story - it's pretty neat :

http://domainnamewire.com/2008/03/18/how-to-develop-your-domain-names-fast/

Ron Jackson’s NameNewbie is an XsitePro site too - http://www.NameNewbie.com

Now imagine if you had five Brazilian guys/gals developing your sites out using easy software like XsitePro, each getting a mere $50 a day, or $$? per site, (which is feasable, I think, knowing what I know about Brazilians - pay extra and they love working for you :bingo, just cranking out the mini-sites one after another. How long do you think it would take to start making some real money so that you could buy even better domains to develop out? And, here's the key, eventually - "your own sales team" selling ads direct to advertisers. All this while you continue to do what you do best - find domains.

I've just had the lowest two days I can remember in the last year or so with Parked.com - and FAB, Sedo, DS, etc... are not doing well either. The same thing is happening everywhere to everyone. AND, this is HIGH SEASON folks - traffic and earnings should be rocking. Just wait until summer if you want to see the dead walking in the desert - if the trend continues. I truly believe this is Yahoo's/Google's doing. But if this continues I am moving a chunk of my domains out of parking and into development to stem the losses. I used to make more money this way and I'll do it again if I have to. It's so easy to pick up the phone and get advertisers on your site you would not even believe it until you tried it. I cold-called advertisers to advertise on my sites starting in 1997 and did it for years. It was EASY sales. Honestly though, my passion is finding domains not developing them. I prefer a prospector's heart to having a builder's grit. But you must follow the money to stay in the game.

So, now, major ad dollars have been flowing to G and Y the last couple of years and G and Y are pushing our click prices into the dirt, AND I would SWEAR that they are now cutting back our reported traffic. It's just a hunch though - nixing Uniques in the Name of Fraud, and in the Name of ......... Just look at some of your generic type-in domains (no expired traffic domains) that have been at Parked or FAB or wherever for 2 + years and look at the uniques reported. There was a sudden crash in uniques reported starting last last year (you have to look closely at long term - graph preferably). You have to look at individual domains not your portfolio, b/c if you keep adding domains and your uniques stay the same or rises a bit, but it does not mean you are not "losing uniques".

After countless 15 + hour work days for years finding these domains and now they tell me they are worth much less and now suddenly get less clicks and lower RPC value. I say, "not true", you can not buy better domains in the niches I bought into. Better domains don't exist - if they had I would have bought them already in my niches. Click prices have not fallen, as far as I can tell using the tools available to check prices.

Some day's earnings seem to hold some sunshine for a brighter future, but then things just turn worse again. It's up and down with earnings every day and that makes NO SENSE. It has never been like this ever before in parking.

Even with a TQ of 10 at Parked I am getting beat into the ground. So, what's the point of Yahoo publishing the TQ score? It would seem a meaningless, scare tactic that you worry about when it drops. It also seems it has no correlation to your earnings, even though they say it does. Yahoo did not think this through well. Transparency is the only thing that will alleviate the animosity and mistrust between domainers and G/Y. So, if they are going to be clear about what our domains are worth by reporting lower payouts, then they need to open up their books. If we can't get this then development is the key, with eventual salesmen/women selling ads on our sites - not G/Y.

Anyone else interested in trying to look into outsourcing mini-sites (mini-sites sounds cheezy - they should be called sites) to begin with, in foreign countries whereby we all "buy-in" or buy directly (I'm want no interest/profit from this)for a certain amount of developed sites per domainer? Maybe one of you living in a foreign country can look into it in your own country and report what it might entail to get started. Me, personally, I will be looking into it. How fast can I get it together? I have no idea since I never attempted this. My guess is that this will only work well with mid to upper tier domains, but who knows.

It would be great if Parked.com did something bold and shocking like this, or some other mechanizations for the greater good at this juncture in time. I would be elated to see it. Maybe it's in the works as Parked has always had sweet surprises for domainers. But I can't sit and wait without knowing - I'm too fidgety when my earnings are lower at every parking company.
.

 

[Donny]

What is the future of parking and Parked.com? Part 1.
This is definitely an interesting question. The future of of domain parking is whatever you want it to be. This is how I see it.

Parking in it's purest form is when you have a domain that has traffic already, the domain is sent to a parking company and they monetize the traffic for you. In our case we have been doing this since 2001. The problem with this is that most domains that have a lot of traffic are owned very few people.

The other side is people who have domains whether they are good with no traffic or just random domains and they want to try and monetize the "domains with little or no traffic". This is why we purchased WhyPark, what they do well is take domains with little or no traffic and help you get listed in the search engines.

One other thing to consider is who is your target audience. If you had a domain about funerals for example and you know people like to do a lot of research, the surfer would probably get a much better experience with a WhyPark style domain then a Parked.com style domain. But it's all about the surfers experience.

Then next thing to think about is what will the advertisers think about the traffic you are sending them. If you have a domain with three dashes and it's a .bz, guess what they are not going to like you one bit. If I can make one recommendation to everybody, .com, .net, .org, nothing else! Think if you are an advertiser and you are getting traffic from a domain and you can't figure out why you have gotten 10 clicks today from donnysformerpornsite.com to "car insurance", you probably wouldn't be too happy. I always love getting calls from the mesothelioma attorneys complaining that a "surfer" just signed up with his site and put in all bogus information. So what's the most important thing in the future is that people will finally realize that it's not always about me, but it's about the advertiser. They are the ones paying the bills.

In the next 6-12 months this is what I see happening.
- Microsoft, Dell, Verizon, Cadna, and a lot of the other big TM owners will start filing lawsuits against everybody who owns even a single TM of theirs. We already block about 99.5% of all trademarks and will continue to block more every day. I don't want to get sued for a domain you own and trust me there are already parking companies who have settled with some of these TM companies. Yes, it sucks to have to delete a domain that is a TM that makes money, but when you realize that they can charge your over $100k per domain, trust me just delete them. And just using some private whois service won't work in the long run.

- My Turkish and Chinese friends will continue to cause problems for us and all parking companies. I don't mean to pick on people from these two countries but 95% of all fraud with us comes from these two countries. Now most of them claim they live somewhere else now, but we still know who they are. Fraud is bad. If you were to spend the same amount of time doing things the right way, imagine how rich you would be.

- Yahoo will still be Yahoo. Still stuck in the their own world where there are only 60 countries in the world.

- Google will make some major changes, that will cause some major problems for their parking providers. You don't think Adsense for Domains was just something for them to have fun with did you?

- Microsoft/Bing will actually try to get into the space. Realize that they are so far behind and want people to sign exclusive 3 year contracts.

- Run of Network will rule the world and drive us all crazy. RON is when you search for some stupid keyword and people are paying for it no matter what. They pay awesome numbers and in countries that nobody wants to pay for. The problem is they in many cases pay more than the real advertisers that you want to see.

- Direct Advertisers. In the past 3 months I have had at least 30 different advertisers contact us directly who wants to bypass Yahoo/Google. What's good about this is that we all make a lot more money because the middle man is out of the picture.

- One or two parking companies will be kicked out of the game for either low volume or low quality scores. I'll assume that these will just be purchased by another company. I also think that at least one company will be purchased as well.

This will be part 1 of a x series.

Donny

 

[Seabass]

if someone type a word/phrase at google search box and klik the tab "I'm feeling lucky" , is that considered as type-in traffic or search engine traffic?

Seach engine only.

Only if they type it into the address bar do I consider it a type-in, as would most domainers. Some metrics include bookmarks as type-ins, but that seems wrong to include those as direct type-in uniques.

xxfireflyxx,
....

So, I still don't quite understand how a "type-in" gets any significant traffic without any kind of promotion or PPC advertising.

Here is what you are missing - and it is very easy to miss b/c it is small, and thus is why there is such a big opportunity : There really is no such thing as significant traffic on most generics. But, if you collect enough of them they stack up. And, unlike expired traffic buyers, it does not leave you as easily. Collecting a boatload is key.

lucky...I'm a noob (about 8 months now), so typein's are pretty much history unless I want to take out a loan

You can still do this without a loan - especially if you are willing to call some domain owners.

I think I read Donny saying that Computer /com gets 1,000 uniques a day. That is kinda' paltry for such a mammoth domain in such a big world, right? But every one of those uniques are pure gold, never leaving parked, month in and month out.

Just like Water,com or Games,com might get type-ins, so do lesser domains like CamoSeatCover,com or GoldFishPond,com or NYCommunityCollege,com, etc..... if you find enough of those then you are in biz. These long-tail domains just mentioned usually make more per click than the top category-killer domains, so big opportunity there. But it is tough. It takes hours and hours every single day, non-stop. Sacrificing time with loved ones, relaxing time, anything. The domains must come first if you want to build something worthwhile - IMO. And usually you are fighting for a small amount of uniques, but those are the golden domains.

I know that many expired traffic domain buyers make a lot of money, and some make more than the method I am suggesting below, but after awhile there will be more domain buyers competing for expired traffic and when the old expired traffic domains bought loose their traffic those guys will have to pay more to keep playing. Lower traffic generics are where it is at b/c the traffic will be there, hopefully forever b/c of the mindshare connection it has with the public.

My thoughts are to simply forget expired traffic domains b/c that traffic will die one day - when who knows, but it will die. Buy only generic domains that have "mindshare", meaning have you ever heard of DogWear,com, or would you have ever typed it? Probably not. Nice brandable name, though. Type-in traffic on this? None to little, probably. So you have to wait for your buyer to show up if you are not actively selling it, and at $7.38 a year per domain, if it does not make any money then that is $7.38 you must sacrifice from a profitable domain. If you get too many dogs like this in your portfolio then you have a vampire effect on your profits from you profitable domains.

So, here is what I do. I try my hardest to buy only domains that have never had a history of development in any form, meaning you see a domain dropping or unused and you buy it b/c you see in Archive,org that it only had a generic Netsol or Godaddy page, etc... standard "registrar parked page" showing. Once you find that, you go to Google and see how many docs match the domain. If you only find domain scouring bots trying to index it, that is a good clue. You don't want it indexed as a site ever. Then, your next step is to check the Whois. If it has Domains By Proxy or Whois Protection, whatever, then it may have already been tested by another domainer and that can be a negative sign. But, if the domain shows it's owner, then look at DomainTools' stat that shows how many other domains the owner owns. If only owns one or two - that's ideal, b/c he is not not an expert (a domainer!). Next step is to use whatever tool you want out there to try and determine the bid - I use NetSpy, which keys off of Google. It's not perfect, but it helps define that market. Next you have to determine what you will pay, and that is determined by how long you think it will take to recoup that amount and move forward from there. At this point you either bid in the auction (this takes a guess on the traffic based on experience, or other complicated methods) or call the owner to see if you can test the traffic for a fee for a month and then offer a buyout at the end of the month. If the traffic is good, you make the buy.

There are several other metrics I use, but if you use these, you can get burnt still, especially in auctions, but more often than not you will have pure traffic that will not drop b/c it was never influenced to have higher traffic.

So to recap what I do:

1. Domain never used (see above)
2. Domain doesn't show as being truly indexed in Google as a site
3. Domain Whois does not show owner as owning lots of domains (domainer!)
4. Determine advertiser's bid prices.
5. Bid for domain or test traffic, then buy

goodkarmaco's suggestions are really good too, I have just found it a bit harder than it used to be, but it still works. I used to do more things like that until I found this system. I killed 'em dead on blog domains when the word "blog" was brand-spanking new - like a two months old or so. Trends/events/happenings can be a good source of domains, but you have to be very careful. I have about 30 primo blog domains by using goodkarmaco's idea, but I also seemed to have lost my ass on "Vlog" domains, which I still own a lot of.

This is more than an answer than you asked for, but I was hoping it would help you or whoever who might be feeling down about the arbitrage b/c the gold is still in those hills.

.

 

[copper]

Could anyone point me to a tutorial or steps on adding an affiliate banner on the parked page? Thank you.

Go to your domain edit page.
Scroll down to bottom of that page.
Click on square button next to "Custom Content".
This will open up custom content editor window.

To add affiliate banner...
Click on menu icon that look like computer monitor on top.
This will give you popup window.
Type in your URL for your banner image.
Click "Insert" button.
Now, you should see banner image.
Click the banner one time.
Click menu icon that look like chain (unbroken chain) on top.
Type in your affiliate URL.
Click "Insert" button.

Here is one of my site with banner.
It's not affiliate banner, but, it should work same.
http://www.lensfitter.com/

 

[netmeg]

Maybe someone here can help me understand something that has me a little confused lately.

I have a domain that receives around 400 daily type-ins. The traffic is not necessarily focused towards one subject or keyword. I had been using a music keyword which generally gets 40-50 clicks daily, but a very low RPC of .07-.08 cents.

I have been experimenting lately with other keywords in an effort to get the most out of this name. One of the keywords I recently used has an RPC of $1.50 with another domain I own, so I thought it would be a good keyword to experiment with.

The keyword performed well, getting over 20 clicks. Yet, the RPC is only .11 cents. What happened to the $1.50 RPC I am making with the identical keyword on the other domain I am using? Why the discrepancy? I have noticed this also with other names I own, and I can't figure out why this phenomena is taking place.

Anyone have an explanation/similar experience they can share?

You have to kind of understand how the PPC works. There's a lot of calculations and variables that go into the value of a click (one of these days I'm going to do a post on that, both from the publisher and the advertiser side)

Just because you get 1.50 for a click on a domain with a particular keyword doesn't by any means you will always get that, or even NEAR to that.

For one thing, advertisers are always fluctuating. Some drop out, some join up. Some notice how much they're spending and suddenly drastically reduce their budgets, some increase. Some use up their daily budgets by noon their time, so other, lower paying advertisers take their place until the next day and the original advertiser's daily budget restarts.

Moreover, if your domain had something to do with music, but you're suddenly putting an entirely different keyword on it - if that keyword isn't directly related to whatever brought that user to your domain in the first place, it doesn't matter WHAT it's worth - they aren't likely to click on the top ads on the page.

When someone searches on your parked domain, they are presented with around 10 (I think) ads on a page. For Google feeds, the top paying ads are usually the first few at the top of the page - it's probably the same for Yahoo feeds, but I don't know for sure. But assuming it is - maybe that top ad *is* paying $1.50, but what if that's not the one your visitor clicked on - for whatever reason, he was more interested in ad #8 which only nets you 14 cents. Or five cents.

There's also the way search engines broad match searches. You may have picked a keyword that somehow can have multiple meanings (and trust me, you wouldn't believe some of the weird ways search engines can match up searches to keywords) So your keyword might be spot on for some people, but it's kind of far fetched for the visitor that happened to land that day.

Another thing that affects the value of the click is the value of your traffic. If I'm running keywords about loan consolidations in North Carolina and I get a bunch of clicks from Spain or India, the search engines are going to discount the amount the parking company (and thus I) get paid; if they didn't, the advertisers would have kittens about paying for traffic that probably won't convert for them. Yea, they should be better about geo targeting, but that doesn't always work either. As far as I have seen, US traffic simply pays better (at least here)

There's some other factors that go into all this, but I haven't got time to post them here; I have a busy day ahead.

But it's not at all unusual for me to run the gamut on a single domain of .02 clicks up to $4 or $5 clicks. There are a lot of variables in play on *every single click*.

Hope that helps.

 

[Domo Sapiens]

Guys:
Check your accounts for blocked/banned domains:
Under:
account information
Domain rating

(I learned the hard way , had some domains blocked for quite sometime )

 

[Donny]

First, all stats that are for today are an estimate. Tomorrow when our providers give us their final numbers we will combine our estimate and their numbers and come up with our final stats for the day. Our estimates include all hits, clicks, etc... Our providers may not always count everything though for many reasons.

Landers/Templates/Layouts have nothing to do with tech guys, it's all desginers. You ever seen a tech guy design a site before? We suck. We currenly have right over 4800 image combinations in our system and trying to come up with some way to actually get all of our previous work to still exist with additional landers is a little tricky. But they are coming, and maybe before you know it.

Time to get back to work.

Donny

 

[Sameh]

I gave it serious contemplation but erred on the side of caution - they probably wouldn't appreciate their content on a parked page. One thing about amazon though - they quickly answer any such questions, so it might be worth running it by them to see if they approve it or not.

I emailed Amazon and got the answer

Hello and thanks for writing to the Associates Program.

You are welcome to post links on a website with a parked domain. If
you need assistance with doing this, please write back to us with more
information and we will be happy to assist you.

 

[Varon]

Could be that the ad blocks on the sites they tested it on were significantly shorter (in terms of vertical pixel size) than the typical parked.com format, and the custom content was too prominent on the first screen thus taking away eyeballs from the ads.

Your stats look pretty impressive. Do you happen to remember what the original CTR values were before adding content?.

Seabass, I remember my figures from before when I had no content and I still see a huge change in CTR.

Mobi Cheap, I have seen a 35% Upward change in CTR. However, the CTR change could be due to many other reasons.

Imo, your CTR depends on various factors and not just your content. You could have no content and yet get a high CTR. I wish I had a way of tracking "visitor duration" which could actually help me understand if visitors are actually spending time on the landing page reading content. In the absence of such information, I can only assume that adding content has helped my CTR.

I feel your CTR is determined 80% in advance based on your site description which the visitor has read before coming to your landing page. I mean if your site has been indexed by a search engine, and if your meta description tells that visitor clearly what he/she is going to expect on your landing page, you have almost created a clickthrough. This is also true for your campaign ad, in case you run a PPC campaign.

I tend to clearly tell my visitors that they are coming to a page of "options" and "choices". I never convey the message that they will get the product/service on my landing page, but specify that they might need to make choices to get to their final destination. That helps a lot. Plus, I use the domain title to always give a "call to action". Something like, "get a free money saver quote now!". That kind of gives them a mental suggestion of an action to consider. It works in most cases.

And as always, I prefer light colors and backgrounds which make the keyword links visible. It is also important to make sure that your related links look clearly visible to increase choices for the visitor. I mean, you don't want the related box to have keywords in black over a red background. That is like killing an opportunity for a click. I like lighter backgrounds which make the ads stand out clearly.

Finally, I am working on creating images with calls to action. A good 250x251 image with an action call can work wonders.

 

[copper]

Are you saying that kind of income is purely from parking these sites? Dude, you so have my attention. Now I know I am asking for trade secrets here and disclosing them might give you some competition, but...

How do you go about finding domains like this?

I am assuming you look up the existence of backlinks on domains that are for sale? Anything else? Gut feeling mojo, what?

(Dammit, I am doing it again. Hijacking yet another thread... :notme: )

Any domain name that make more than 3 cents per day is a
positive domain since it will make $10.95 - $8 (reg. fee) = $2.95 per year :D

Some of my domains go against some basic rules of domain
business such as very long and dash in them.

How to find them?
Here are some basic how to.

Do search using OVT. - how much OVT?
Google - how many search result pages?
Google - how many ads showing?
Backlinks - if it's dropping domains.
Archived pages - if it's dropping domains.

Let me show you extreme case.

For example, creditcard-balancetransfers.com
This made $34.33 since 2007-09-11.

21320 OVT for "credit card balance transfer".
Google - 745,000 for "credit card balance transfer" with quotes.
Many google ads for these keywords.
Backlinks - none since it's not dropped domain.
Archived - none since it's not dropped domain.

I wanted to get CreditCardBalanceTransfer.com, but, it's not available.
2nd choice, CreditCardBalanceTransfers.com - not available.
3rd choice, CreditCardsBalanceTransfer.com - not available.
4th choice, CreditCardsBalanceTransfers.com - not available.
5th choice, CreditCard-BalanceTransfer.com - not available.
Damn!
I usually quit about here, however, stats are too good to give up.
So...
I get CreditCard-BalanceTransfers.com
It seems I'll make about $70/year minus reg. fee.
Am I going to renew? Certainly!

It may not be much, but, what if you find 1,000 such domains?
That's $70K/year and it's not so little any more
You can find 3 such domains per day, easy.
You'll have more than 1,000 such domains one year later.

CreditCards-BalanceTransfers.com is available.
This may make about $30/year? :D

 

[netmeg]

netmeg, I had read that but I don't understand what they mean by "on the fly". Don't Google and Yahoo do that already with Smart Pricing and TQ score.

Do you know what they mean exactly by "on the fly"?

They've never admitted it outright, but I've always believed that Smart Pricing occurs 'on the fly'. On the fly means that the value of the click is not pre-determined, but calculated based on the set of circumstances occurring at the exact time of the click. Nobody but Google or Yahoo knows what all of these circumstances are, but we can guess about some of them. Smart Pricing is only applicable for the Content Network (and possibly the Search Network which includes parked domains); it does not encompass ads found on Google's own search pages. I don't know enough about Yahoo to know much about TQ, but it's probably somewhat similar.

Smart Pricing is the the "break" that Google gives to the advertiser, recognizing that not all traffic is created equal, with an equal likelihood of conversion. It most likely takes into account any number of things - source of traffic, location of traffic, average CTR and/or conversion rate for the site where the ad appears, average CTR or conversion rate for *similar* sites to the one where the ad appears, publisher history (over all sites they own) and who knows what all else. To some degree, it's predictive.

Quality Score refers to the combined relevance of the advertiser's keywords, ad text, and landing page. It can also encompass account history, keyword history, CTR, and other things as well. There's more than one kind of Quality Score - Content has a different type than Search, ads have their own QS and so do accounts.

Up till now, all of these things were more or less static - once your Quality Scores were established, they didn't get changed until Google came along and re-evaluated things. That would cause certain keywords to go inactive. Now they're going to calculate them 'on the fly'- meaning at the time they occur - so keywords won't be inactive anymore; while it might not be relevant enough for Search A, they might display it for Search B.

(There's a much better description of this at url: http://www.bgtheory.com/blog/dissecting-adwords-quality-score-changes/)

What I'm saying is that there is really no such thing as a static click price (anyone who does a lot of AdWords or YSM advertising can tell you that) anymore. The value of any given click is calculated at the exact time of the click, based on whatever circumstances (on both sides - advertiser and publisher) are occuring at the time of the click. Advertiser history, landing page, publisher history, competition, time of day, country of origin, budget - the list is too long to type in, and we'll never know the whole thing.

So it shouldn't really come as a surprise when clicks in ANY given niche vary wildly in price. There's a thousand different things being taken into account. The best you can do is work with averages and don't worry about individual clicks. That's probably why TQ doesn't kick in until you get to 100 or so clicks per day.

In my opinion.

 

[AWRosey]

You can add content to your parked domains at Parked, hoping to get indexed. However, overall you should just let Google and Yahoo crawl your domains.....and if you get listed then consider yourself lucky.

Interesting that you bring this up. For some odd reason I decided this past weekend to check G & Y for indexing of my 380+ domains. Although unscientific, I did come up with some interesting findings.

I park my domains with three companies: Parked for my best domains, Fabulous for my next tier, and Sedo for my LLLLL and lowest quality domains. Approximately 64% of my domains are at Parked with the remaining 36% split evenly between Fabulous and Sedo.

Of the domains I park with Parked:
66% are indexed on Google
18% are indexed on Yahoo

Of the domains I park with Fabulous:
63% are indexed on Google
22% are indexed on Yahoo

Of the domains I park with Sedo:
90% are indexed on Google
16% are indexed on Yahoo

Once again, these results are very unscientific and do not take into accout previous development, age of the domain, or position of the domain in actual keyword searches, just that they are indexed.

However, I was completely suprised to find that 90% of the crap domains I have with Sedo are indexed on Google. I have no idea why Sedo has such strength with Google. Next I will probly try taking some of my better, unindexed, domains from Parked and list them with Sedo for a few weeks to see if they become indexed.

I was also suprised that there was such a disparity between the percentage indexed by Google and by Yahoo. You would hope that Parked with their relationship with Y, would have some insight in how to improve the indexing of their parked pages there. But this wasn't a problem of just Parked but similar percentages were had by all with regards to Yahoo.

Also of interest with my Parked.com domains was which page was actually indexed. As you know, Parked has a "Domain Inquiry" page in addition to the main page, but Fabulous and Sedo only have one page.

Of the domains I have at Parked that were indexed by Google:
19% have the Main page only indexed
56% have the 'Domain Inquiry' page only indexed, and
25% have both pages indexed

Of the domains at Parked that have been indexed by Yahoo:
65% have the Main page indexed, and
35% have both pages indexed

I did not find any corelation between the indexing of .com's, .net's, or .info's. But, even though my inventory of .us's is too small to matter, none of them were indexed.

While I didn't notice much of a difference between domains where I used the Title Tags and Meta Description Tags, it is my belief that use of these help to place some 'indexable' content on the page.

What does all this actually mean? Other than I have too much time on my hands, probably nothing. But with approximately 2/3's of my domains indexed, I believe that there is a little more involved than just luck as SeaBass stated. I also can't believe that it is just dumb luck that 90% of my domains parked with Sedo are indexed on Google. I don't know.

Just my $0.02

Alan

 

[amoeba]

parked.com is good for well-targeted names, especially american traffic. it's quite hard to get a 1-click lander, but if you do, it often pays well. if a domain gets >100% clickthrough, parked rocks, cause they pay for all clicks. i have one name that usually gets like 4 or 5 clicks per visitor, at $.32 each.

i'm convinced that if they gave me a 1-click lander for rides.org it would do well at parked, but since that doesn't seem to be happening i have it at nd and its earnings are way up. it really depends on the name.

 

[whitebark]

Parked rocks for some of my .ca portfolio. They pay very well for US and Canadian traffic, and of course unlike some other parking companies they actually pay you for multiple clicks on your domain from the same user! Adult domains really take advantage of this at times.

 

[NameCharger]

When are payouts?

 

[Donny]

We have been live to the general public since May 2006. We were alpha/beta testing since January 2006 until the launch. But we have been parking domains since 1999. I personally have been working on the product for 4 years now.

In a nutshell this is a similiar same product that we used for our own domains for about 2 years before we decided to offer it to the publc. But we have had a Yahoo domain contract since 1999.

Donny

 

[mwhite]

OK, you should be able to get into the site now. Thanks again for your patience during the downtime. We really appreciate it.

 

[ZOX]

Hi Donny and SDX

I just parked my highest revenue name at parked. I would like to customize and optimize it better than it is now.

There are certain ads I would like to remove.

Please PM me to discuss this.

Thanks

PM sent.

where do you check you quality score?

You can ask your account rep and they will tell you. :tu:

 

[ZOX]

And thanks you are good at coming back and answering stuff....

I'm SERIOUSLY not ass-kissing when I say...Yes, Donny's one of the best at that! :tu:

 

[ZOX]

I looked around Parked.com's website and could not seem to find an answer. Does Parked allow adult names?

Yes, with some "nice" adult templates as well!

 

[ZOX]

Thanyou Varon.
Great advice.

I have 2 questions for you or anyone.

1/ when putting in meta tags etc, can we just enter words separated by ,

or do you have to use < > etc.?

2/ if using custom pages the pictures have to be exact the right size whch is a bit of a pain as you have to make every one same size. if you're not a whizz (like me) and even downloaded jpeg resize software gets you scratching head, is there an online resource that lets you resize pics to parked exact standards & then save?

thanks for any help & hepl already

i also have to add, i needed to ask Donny something twice and his support is quick & impressive.
cheerss

I use resizepic.com for a quick pic resize, Arnie
I ABSOLUTELY have NO affiliation with this site...it's just real easy to use. :tu:

Donny : Why u didn't still add automated optimization for landing pages?something like change color of templates ...

This thread seems to be HOT 24 users online!

The HOTTEST Thread on Namepros! :tu:

 

[Donny]

Varon - I talk to you on the phone for an hour or so the other day and now you know everything! Nicely written.

Donny : Why u didn't still add automated optimization for landing pages?something like change color of templates ...

We do have this buiilt in already. Look at your page, then take a shot of really bad tequila. Look at your page again. If it's the same colors as before drink 2 shots of tequila. And continue until the colors are different.

I've tried this one before and it does work. Just please don't do any drunk clicking.

On a serious note, the ability to do this is already in our system we just never implemented it due to time constraints. When we launch our new editor, it will include the ability to rotate layouts and colors if that is your choice.

In my opinion, The two click lander, is going to have to be revised to be able to attract nice CTR, It needs to be as website like as possible, Large, long page, A header graphic and ect. It is much like ParkingDots , right now, Kind of just a small page, small fonts, with all the subjects cramped together, Not appealing to a net surfer,Imo

I know some people don't think we have the best landers in the world, but compare our 2 click Yahoo CTR to the other companies that have a 2 click domains from Yahoo. I bet we beat them! Don't get me wrong, we are already working on a system that will have as many landers as you want, design your own if you want. But right now our CTR is high for a reason.

Donny