Massive drop in CTR - Why?

[avstrad]

I have a domain that I bought in December 2007, when it expired. The company that owned it decided to move to a domain of the same name but with the .net suffix, rather than the .com suffix, which is the one I now own.

I parked this domain with Namedrive, and I've been very pleased with how it has done. It cost me $230, and has earned me around $700 between January and the end of July. The revenue had gradually increased month by month. The CTR has been around 35%.

Since the 1st of August, the number of views has stayed about the same, but the CTR has dropped to less than 2%. I have not made any changes to the page or the keywords.

I emailed Namedrive and this is their reply:

I checked the domain and it could be that since much of the traffic to
the domain is from the site that used to be there, many visitors may be
choosing to visit the new .net site rather than clicking on links. I do see as well that the number of views has remained steady but the number of hits on the domain since July 1st has halved. There may have been bot traffic to the domain which has since been filtered out or stopped which could account for the loss of clicks as well if they were not purely from real users. Do you have any idea where most of these views are coming from? The only thing I can see we could do to try and increase the clicks would be to try other keywords for the domain.

I have found Namedrive to be very helpful in the past, so I am not complaining about this response, it's just that I don't really understand it so I don't know if it makes sense or not. I have emailed back asking for an explanation, which I'll probably get after the weekend.

In the meantime, can anyone help me understand what may be going on?

What is the difference between 'views' and 'hits'?


Thanks

 

[Varon]

I am assuming the views are the actual visits and the hits are the clicks. As far as the drop in CTR, there could be varied factors and your parking company would be the best source to pinpoint it and guide you.

 

[johname]

The company that owned it decided to move to a domain of the same name but with the .net suffix, rather than the .com suffix,

What company would drop there dot com and move to the exact dot net name? I dont think I can remember anyone ever doing this.

Maybe people have the .com bookmarked or followed a link they used before, And at first looked around your namedrive page thinking "i know i have the right page" and they click.......But now a fair amount of people know that the site has change there extension, they still stumble on to the namedrive page but they are not so willing to hunt around there anymore.


People behave differntly once they know for sure they not on the right page, and my guess is you now have a higher percent of vistors that have smarting up on this. The time frame for this is right to, roughly 6 months

 

[netmeg]

What company would drop there dot com and move to the exact dot net name? I dont think I can remember anyone ever doing this.

Actually, I saw this exact thing happen with my own domain name. I had the .org, and when I went to get the .com, I was less than 24 hours too late - an ISP scooped up the .com and the .net. They used the .com for a while, and then inexplicably, dropped the .com and kept on using the .net.

 

[johname]

Development might be next move

Try testing it by switching parking companys

Toss it up on sedo for a while






Some sites get dropped because the name was in the hand of the website designer not the company owner, maybe this is the case

 

[hookah]

This case looks very strange. Steady views number, steady revenue for half a year and suddenly CTR going down from over 30 to 2?? Wow, IMHO this is not because of link, listings etc. removing. It would happen much earlier if so. I dont believe in such miracles. Does your parking manager checked up carefully whether all your clicks are counted in the right way and there is no bug causing it? If I were you I'd ask for another review or simply test it with another parking program as already said. I can imagine it could happen when a real traffic is (by coincidence) substituted by a bot traffic...

 

[PowerUp]

Sooooo, if it's something that made you $700. Develop it.

I know I would.

Good luck

L2

I have a domain, parked, earning about $300 a month.
The name is so niche, I don't know how to develop it. Think "toilet paper"

 

[avstrad]

Thanks for all the replies so far - they have given me food for thought.

l2ride55 - I understand about the domain having a reduction in traffic and CTR for the reasons you explained, it's just that the views have stayed pretty much the same, while the CTR dropped from 35% to 2% in the space of 24 hours.

However, I am happy with what I've had from this domain so it doesn't owe me anything.

I will probably try it with a different parking provider just to see what happens.

Yes, it seems odd for a company who owns a .com name to transfer to a .net name. No idea why they did this.

 

[netmeg]

It could be any number of things. Are the ads the same? If you're parked on Namedrive, that means it's probably being fed ads by Google. Some of your key advertisers might have depleted their budgets (end of month) or turned their advertising down or off, or decided to block their ads from being shown on parked domains. So you're getting ads, but you're not getting the ads that have produced clicks before.

What about the source and location of your traffic? Google's personalization applies to parked domain feeds too. So the ads I might see on your domain are completely different than what you might see, and if you had a sudden change in the source or location of your traffic, that could well affect your click through rate. Just from what I've seen on my own domains and other parked domains, I am quite certain that the keyword you specify is not the only metric in deciding which ads display on a domain when I land on it.

PPC for any given domain or even niche is very much a moving target, and there are many many things that can affect it. With a parked domain, there's not a whole lot you can do to correct or make up for that - you can try parking it on a different feed (try someone with a Yahoo feed for a while) and see if that makes a difference, but ultimately, because you don't have a lot of control, it's probably better not to worry about it too much, and move on to more lucrative things, like another domain, or development.

 

[gingeman]

2 points.

Several times I have seen a company drop a .com and move their site to the .net. I own several .coms where this has happened and the clueless company resented paying a mionimal amount to retain their .com...

I would have to agree with netmeg that it sounds like the most likely cause of a drop in ctr is the quality/relevance of adverts beong displayed. It is probable that one of the most relevant dvertisers on your name has stopped their campaign and left the parked site with no adverts of interest to the visitors. Also, the PPC climate is weak- I have seen a drop in ctr/clicks and revenue of over 70% in the last two months at fab and ds, and a smaller drop at namedrive also.

 

[avstrad]

Thanks again to everyone who has taken the trouble to reply.

Am I right in thinking that Namedrive use a Google feed?

If so, which parking providers use Yahoo?

(or vice versa)

Thanks

 

[Varon]

Thanks again to everyone who has taken the trouble to reply.

Am I right in thinking that Namedrive use a Google feed?

If so, which parking providers use Yahoo?

(or vice versa)

Thanks

Skenzo, Parked, DDC, TrafficZ, SmartName, etc are Yahoo feeds.

 

[gingeman]

namedrive, domainsponsor, fab - google

parked - yahoo

 

[ailema]

i think the visitors dont notice the ads in the panel thats why your CTR decreases