Atom / Atom.com - Marketplace (formerly Squadhelp)

[JudgeMind]

Hey Folks,

I've just started using squadhelp.com to list some of my brandable. So far I have 76 domains listed, there is no fee to list. I've had some decent action so far in the way of interested buyers but no sales as of yet. I've only been with them for 1 week now.

A bit of a summary review of SquadHelp:

PROS

• No Listing fee
• No Logo design fee
• Ability to submit your names to end users holding naming contests
• Ability to chat directly or send a message directly to end users.
• Stats of your marketplace domains are shown in the marketplace dashboard.
• Their customer service and support has been great, 24hr a day chat.
• Ability to increase or decrease the list price of your domains or to show a discount. You can decrease or increase the price yourself by $200. If you want to lower more, you can contact support.
• End users can shortlist your domains before they make a decision on which they want to purchase. The number of shortlists is shown in you marketplace dashboard.
• When you submit your names you get to set the price you wish to get. Because their commissions are high I recommend listing at a higher price to offset the commission costs.
• Their landing pages are fairly basic but they work. Because the marketplace is fairly new, I'm sure we will see style improvements in the future.
• One thing I really like is they accept multiple extensions. I have listed .co and .io along with .com
• Each seller gets a direct link to their marketplace portfolio, HERES MY PORTFOLIO. It is handy if your trying to p[promote your portfolio through social media.
• I like that their marketplace doesn't have tens of thousands domain listings like BB. They are fairly strict on the domains they accept to list and so this helps keep the number of domains in the marketplace down and gets your listings more exposure.

CONS

• Their commissions are very high, depending on the domain name they are usually between 30% and 35%. However, there are no listing fees, no logo design fees, so in the end their commission is very similar to brand buckets.
• Their logos are not top quality, in fact I requested to have some of my logos remade.
• I think they have a big backlog of logos to design, the wait time for logo design has been around 1 week, but your names are still listed while the logos are being designed.
• After your names are accepted you need to agree to their commission rate, at this point you also need to apply your own keywords, descriptions etc. I found this was very time consuming.

 

[JudgeMind]

@JudgeMind

I expected that you have higher views ratio from type-in traffic but it seems you dont, so I find your SH influenced numbers oddly low.

I think you need to work on classification, categories and root words. I dedicate a lot of time on these things each time I add new domains. Also I from time to time I check my old domains and modify names with low completeness score.

Btw dont rely on paid classification I tried it couple of times and got bad results, sometimes they dont even fill all possible uses! I advice you to do it yourself.

every one of my premium listings has excellent classification. I actually paid to have Squadhelp classify and describe most of the 576 listings. Perhaps @GrantP could supply me with rationale as to why the Squadhelp influenced traffic for my portfolio is so low. I’ve done everything I was told to do by squadhelp, so I’m lost as to the reasoning behind their lack of marketing on my portfolio.

Quite frustrating to say the least. As I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to have Squadhelp “expert classify” my portfolio, purchase super boosts weekly at a cost of $32/week, adjust my pricing to be competative <$2000, apply discounts to domains weekly, submit to contests and allow others to as well..... there’s nothing else I can do. I’ve spent hundreds of hours making sure my portfolio is optimized. I feel it boils down to lack of marketing..

Just sharing my experience and informing all of you what’s working and what’s not.

this will be my last post in this thread for some time. Watch for other marketplace review threads coming soon.

 

[boker]

every one of my premium listings has excellent classification. I actually paid to have Squadhelp classify and describe most of the 576 listings. Perhaps @GrantP could supply me with rationale as to why the Squadhelp influenced traffic for my portfolio is so low. I’ve done everything I was told to do by squadhelp, so I’m lost as to the reasoning behind their lack of marketing on my portfolio. Quite frustrating to say the least.

I'm at 28%, it was 26% earlier today and looks like the average for all SH premium listings is at 37%, so not to far away.

 

[gblasting]

mine is also around 1.0 - 1.3 average daily views
i get very little marketing exposure now, my stats have looked like this for a few months now.
Show attachment 174350

I don't seem to have access to this chart on my dashboard. Is this one of the benefits reserved for large portfolio holders? Can't find 'access to analytics' on the benefit tiers page as well. @GrantP

 

[karmaco]

every one of my premium listings has excellent classification. I actually paid to have Squadhelp classify and describe most of the 576 listings. Perhaps @GrantP could supply me with rationale as to why the Squadhelp influenced traffic for my portfolio is so low. I’ve done everything I was told to do by squadhelp, so I’m lost as to the reasoning behind their lack of marketing on my portfolio.

Quite frustrating to say the least. As I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to have Squadhelp “expert classify” my portfolio, purchase super boosts weekly at a cost of $32/week, adjust my pricing to be competative <$2000, apply discounts to domains weekly, submit to contests and allow others to as well..... there’s nothing else I can do. I’ve spent hundreds of hours making sure my portfolio is optimized. I feel it boils down to lack of marketing..

apologies to all, my posts aren’t very rosey lately. Just sharing my experience and trying to share what’s working and what’s not.

this will be my last post in this thread for some time. Watch for other marketplace review threads coming soon.

This kind of thing is bound to happen when a marketplace grows by such a massive margin in such a short period of time.Bubble might be bursting.

I suspect SH has done well thus far with very low pricing. Problem is that is not even helpful when there are so many other names priced the same way.Best of luck to you and keep us posted.

 

[JudgeMind]

I don't seem to have access to this chart on my dashboard. Is this one of the benefits reserved for large portfolio holders? Can't find 'access to analytics' on the benefit tiers page as well. @GrantP

It’s in detailed analytics under premium listings

 

[Atom.com]

every one of my premium listings has excellent classification. I actually paid to have Squadhelp classify and describe most of the 576 listings. Perhaps @GrantP could supply me with rationale as to why the Squadhelp influenced traffic for my portfolio is so low. I’ve done everything I was told to do by squadhelp, so I’m lost as to the reasoning behind their lack of marketing on my portfolio.

@JudgeMind One important factor why you may see a drop in "SH influenced" metric is if you have a sizeable WLM portfolio which is driving type-in traffic to SH landing pages. If you point your WLM traffic to SH branded landing pages, those visits are likely being counted as Direct visits since most WLM visits are not influenced by SH marketing.

We are evaluating the possibility of excluding any WLM visits from this specific metric so that the SH influenced metric continues to show data for premium domains only.

 

[Atom.com]

I don't seem to have access to this chart on my dashboard. Is this one of the benefits reserved for large portfolio holders? Can't find 'access to analytics' on the benefit tiers page as well. @GrantP

@gblasting These reports are currently available in your dashboard if you have 50 or more Premium domains listed on the platform.

 

[JudgeMind]

@JudgeMind One important factor why you may see a drop in "SH influenced" metric is if you have a sizeable WLM portfolio which is driving type-in traffic to SH landing pages. If you point your WLM traffic to SH branded landing pages, those visits are likely being counted as Direct visits since most WLM visits are not influenced by SH marketing.

We are evaluating the possibility of excluding any WLM visits from this specific metric so that the SH influenced metric continues to show data for premium domains only.

this makes sense to me and it’s not something I considered since I was looking at analytics in my premium dashboard. I think it would be good to keep things separate so folks like me don’t misinterpret the stats were being shown.

 

[Atom.com]

There have been few posts and questions related to our Advertising investment and website visitors, so I would like to share some information that might be helpful.

We have been consistently increasing our Marketing spends month over month this year. We switched to a very different advertising and customer acquisition strategy in April 2020 (when we started seeing the initial impacts of Pandemic). While we can not share the exact specifics of the changes, we are now spending a disproportionate amount of our advertising budgets towards customers who are expected to purchase higher value domains. Previously, our approach was a bit like "mass marketing", resulting in a lot more visits to the platform. Now, our approach is much more targeted. As an example, in certain countries and marketing channels, we can get visitors at an extremely low cost of 8-10 cents per click. On the other hand, the cost per click is as high as $4 in other cases. We were finding that many of the "lower cost" visits were not leading to sales. Therefore, we are now spending a lot more in our average cost per click to bring those buyers who are expected to achieve higher value sales. As a result, while we may not get as many mass visitors as our previous strategy, the quality of the visitors has greatly increased.

We are seeing the direct impact of these changes in our overall Marketplace metrics. For example, in the month of October, we achieved over 4X in revenue (Premium Domain Sales) compared to the revenue achieved just 7 months ago in April when we began implementing these changes. Our ASP metric has also been consistently increasing month over month (because of a greater number of higher value sales)

We will likely publish a more detailed analysis of our 2020 performance in the future.

Achieving month over month increase in Marketplace sales, ASP as well as new customer acquisition are all important aspects of our strategy, and we will continue to redeploy a significant portion of our revenue back into Advertising spends .

 

[JudgeMind]

There have been few posts and questions related to our Advertising investment and website visitors, so I would like to share some information that might be helpful.

We have been consistently increasing our Marketing spends month over month this year. We switched to a very different advertising and customer acquisition strategy in April 2020 (when we started seeing the initial impacts of Pandemic). While we can not share the exact specifics of the changes, we are now spending a disproportionate amount of our advertising budgets towards customers who are expected to purchase higher value domains. Previously, our approach was a bit like "mass marketing", resulting in a lot more visits to the platform. Now, our approach is much more targeted. As an example, in certain countries and marketing channels, we can get visitors at an extremely low cost of 8-10 cents per click. On the other hand, the cost per click is as high as $4 in other cases. We were finding that many of the "lower cost" visits were not leading to sales. Therefore, we are now spending a lot more in our average cost per click to bring those buyers who are expected to achieve higher value sales. As a result, while we may not get as many mass visitors as our previous strategy, the quality of the visitors has greatly increased.

We are seeing the direct impact of these changes in our overall Marketplace metrics. For example, in the month of October, we achieved over 4X in revenue (Premium Domain Sales) compared to the revenue achieved just 7 months ago in April when we began implementing these changes. Our ASP metric has also been consistently increasing month over month (because of a greater number of higher value sales)

We will likely publish a more detailed analysis of our 2020 performance in the future.

Achieving month over month increase in Marketplace sales, ASP as well as new customer acquisition are all important aspects of our strategy, and we will continue to redeploy a significant portion of our revenue back into Advertising spends .

Are you saying your marketing is heavily weighted to domains listed at higher pricing? If so, what threshold are you using for this? Names listed above $2500 or...

 

[Atom.com]

Are you saying your marketing is heavily weighted to domains listed at higher pricing? If so, what threshold are you using for this? Names listed above $2500 or...

No - our Marketing is now heavily weighted towards those customer demographics who likely have a greater spending power, even though it costs more to target and show our Ads to those customers. We do not prioritize our spends to specifically promote higher value domains but since we are bringing more higher value customers compared to our previous strategy, we are seeing a consistent increase in our ASP. Hope that makes sense.

 

[Ostrados]

No - our Marketing is now heavily weighted towards those customer demographics who likely have a greater spending power, even though it costs more to target and show our Ads to those customers. We do not prioritize our spends to specifically promote higher value domains but since we are bringing more higher value customers compared to our previous strategy, we are seeing a consistent increase in our ASP. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for sharing this valuable info.

It is great to see increase in higher end sales, but did you see decrease in lower end sales (below $2000) after implementing this strategy?

 

[DomainBanana]

SH suddenly removed the marketplace STR numbers from the seller dashboard.

I have appreciated SH's transparency in sharing this key metric and would like to see the numbers return.

I believe we should be able to monitor SH's numbers through good times and bad, not only when things are favorable to SH.

SH's traffic has also been declining month-over-month, having lost approximately 40% of its volume in the period of May through October. This is a surprise since the marketplace has added thousands of premium domains in this time. It would be helpful to understand the reasons for this decline and how the marketplace plans to reverse this downward trend.

 

[Ostrados]

SH's traffic has also been declining month-over-month, having lost approximately 40% of its volume in the period of May through October. This is a surprise since the marketplace has added thousands of premium domains in this time. It would be helpful to understand the reasons for this decline and how the marketplace plans to reverse this downward trend.

@GrantP already explained the reason for traffic decline in his post above:

We switched to a very different advertising and customer acquisition strategy in April 2020 (when we started seeing the initial impacts of Pandemic). While we can not share the exact specifics of the changes, we are now spending a disproportionate amount of our advertising budgets towards customers who are expected to purchase higher value domains. Previously, our approach was a bit like "mass marketing", resulting in a lot more visits to the platform. Now, our approach is much more targeted. As an example, in certain countries and marketing channels, we can get visitors at an extremely low cost of 8-10 cents per click. On the other hand, the cost per click is as high as $4 in other cases. We were finding that many of the "lower cost" visits were not leading to sales. Therefore, we are now spending a lot more in our average cost per click to bring those buyers who are expected to achieve higher value sales. As a result, while we may not get as many mass visitors as our previous strategy, the quality of the visitors has greatly increased.

We are seeing the direct impact of these changes in our overall Marketplace metrics. For example, in the month of October, we achieved over 4X in revenue (Premium Domain Sales) compared to the revenue achieved just 7 months ago in April when we began implementing these changes. Our ASP metric has also been consistently increasing month over month (because of a greater number of higher value sales)

We will likely publish a more detailed analysis of our 2020 performance in the future.

Achieving month over month increase in Marketplace sales, ASP as well as new customer acquisition are all important aspects of our strategy, and we will continue to redeploy a significant portion of our revenue back into Advertising spends .

As I understood they are now focusing more on targeted advertising instead of mass advertising. This switch started in April 2020 which explains the sudden drop in "Squadhelp" searches at Google trends that I reported before:

Oh there is really sharp decline in SquadHelp search at Google trends

Show attachment 173887

The decline started after April 2020
I wonder what happened?!

 

[JudgeMind]

Thank you for clearing up some concerns we had @GrantP

 

[Atom.com]

SH suddenly removed the marketplace STR numbers from the seller dashboard.

I have appreciated SH's transparency in sharing this key metric and would like to see the numbers return.

For years, SH boasted of its "best in class STR", yet it never backed up this claim by providing actual comparisons to other marketplaces.

Now that SH's marketplace STR has been steadily declining month-over-month, it seems the marketplace thinks it's convenient to hide these numbers from the seller community.

I believe we should be able to monitor SH's numbers through good times and bad, not only when things are favorable to SH.

Thanks for your feedback. We continue to display a significant level of data and information regarding our sales, including a fully searchable sales database. We are also open to changing or finding new ways to improve the information shown in the dashboard.

We've received feedback (including via some recent threads here) about how the sitewide STR metric can be misinterpreted or how it may be misleading. In addition, these metrics can also set an expectation that all sellers will be able to achieve a certain STR. The reality is that each portfolio is different and some sellers will do much better than the average while others will do worse.

As a result, we have decided it is best to focus on those metrics that are specific to individual portfolios, and are directly actionable. Therefore, the sellers will continue to see their own annualized sell-through stats, and also compare those to other sellers via various sections of our dashboard.

We plan to continue to add additional metrics that are actionable. For example, recently we added a real time Portfolio Optimization score which can provide specific list of actions a seller can take to improve their portfolio.

In addition, we plan to share additional platform data via ongoing updates and reports to keep everyone informed about the trajectory and trends at platform level.

SH's traffic has also been declining month-over-month, having lost approximately 40% of its volume in the period of May through October. This is a surprise since the marketplace has added thousands of premium domains in this time. It would be helpful to understand the reasons for this decline and how the marketplace plans to reverse this downward trend.

I have previously shared some changes we have made to our Marketing approach (a shift from "Mass" focus to a more targeted focus). Having said that, we do not see a noticeable change in our visitors. Even though our targeted approach brings a lower number of visitors, we have also been increasing our marketing spends. I am attaching a chart directly from Google Analytics for better context.

While some of the website traffic is from creatives who are participating in our ongoing naming contests, an important thing to note is that almost 90% of our monthly traffic is from new visitors, which helps with new customer acquisitions.

 

[DomainBanana]

@GrantP already explained the reason for traffic decline in his post above:

The shift in ad strategy accounts for the lower traffic, it doesn't account for the regular decrease in STR, which is now hidden from us.

Last time the annualized marketplace STR was visible, it was around 3.85%, and dropping every week.

It would be helpful to be able to monitor these numbers and to know whether SH has a plan to reverse this trend.

 

[DomainBanana]

I am attaching a chart directly from Google Analytics for better context.

Thank you for the Google Analytics chart, @GrantP .

I wonder why it's so different from Similar Web's data:

 

[BrandEntrance.com]

yes, mine too. Looks like they are stuck there forever. I removed one of them and listed at Afternic instead.

I give up on those reviews etc. The reviewers are selling 4-5 domains a month and it makes you wonder. Gut feeling.

No way you can catch up to the 'initial adopters' they are the ones with 500,000+ points, 85%+ credibility etc etc etc and they can submit countless trash domains to competitions. I see the comments from CHs and know what is going on.

 

[Atom.com]

Thank you for the Google Analytics chart, @GrantP .

I wonder why it's so different from Similar Web's data:

All third party tracking tools use estimation and extrapolation methodologies to determine traffic, since they do not have access to the actual website visit data. Similarweb is generally more accurate than other tools such as Alexa however it still uses estimation data. Any significant changes in visitor mix and channels can potentially effect these estimates.

The most reliable and accurate is of course Google Analytics since it is based on real visits that are being measured at source.