Does the length of a domain affect type ins?

[dsiomtw]

It seems like longer names, even if they are extremely popular search terms, don't get nearly as many type ins as other domains with similar search counts. For example, domains x and y might each get 250,000 searchs a month according to overture, and domain x gets 200 type ins and domain y might get only 5 or something really low. I've noticed this a lot, and I guess it sort of makes sense. Is this common knowledge, or just a fluke thing?

 

[godinu]

For typo type-ins, people typing in a short domain may hit enter before noticing they've made a typo. When typing a long domain name someone may notice they've made an error and correct it first.
In general i think we're used to nice, short terms as domain names. The trend towards longer names is recent. If someone is mistakenly typing search terms into the URL bar instead of the search area, they're also more likely to catch it for a long phrase than a short one. Long typeins are also less likely. Someone would be more apt to do a search of "best John Lennon album" than type in "bestjohnlennonalbum.com" and hope to get a hit.

 

[Epic]

Yes it affects it. I'd be more likely to type in forest.com rather than americanforest.com

 

[peter phillips]

To some extent I would say yes, the length of a domain does affect type-ins. People tend to type a short name in the toolbar and remember easily. Unless the name is really very popular I think type-ins will really get affected if the name is long.

 

[Macke]

very very much, yes.. every extra letter and you can exclude a lot of hits.

 

[dsiomtw]

Cool, thought so.

One more question ... I'm sort of confused on the whole type in thing.

I understand that some people occasionally just type domain.com into the address bar of their browser to go to that site and see what's there. I do it myself once in a while.

What I don't fully understand is the whole Overture with extension thing ...

Is it just based on the fact that once in a while someone will think they are typing domain.com into the address bar of their browser, but in reality they enter it into a Google or Yahoo, etc. toolbar rather than in the address bar?

So in reality if Overture says domain.com had 500 searches last month that domain actually got way more type ins than that since most people do NOT enter it into the search bar accidently, right? If you assumed that 1 out of 10 people used the tool/search bar on accident instead of the address bar, that means domain.com more realistically got at least 5000 type ins last month?

Or is there more to it than that?

I was under the impression that "direct navigation" also included things like typing search terms and keyword phrases into the address bar. I thought I remember that, at least in the past, if you type something like "search term" directly into the address bar, most browsers would take you directly to searchterm.com automatically. But my IE with Google Toolbar just generates Google search results page, and my Firefox seems to automatically take you to the site that is listed first in the Google results.