Ten Points About Traffic Monetisation

[Whizzbang]

Contrary to what many people suggest....domain parking is very much alive and well. I was interested in some of the debates around which parking company a domainer should choose. My response is simple, all of them.

Here's a number of key points around domain parking that should be seriously considered:

1. I have data that proves that no parking company wins more than 25% of any portfolios traffic. This means that if you have all of your domains at a single company that 75% of the time the domains would perform better elsewhere.
2. Around one third of domains win at a different parking company every 3 months.....in other words, it's a moving target.
3. To measure which solution is winning you MUST develop a normalised RPM. I've spoke about this at a lot of the conferences over the years. Measuring revenue is NOT an accurate measure of success....sorry to disapoint. A normalised rpm is Revenue/Raw traffic * 1000. RPM is NOT meaningful as it depends upon the filtering technology employed by each parking company.
   
4. All testing must be simultaneous. If you do not do simultaneous testing then you will have distortions in the data.
5. There are over 7 different revenue numbers for every domain each month and choosing which number to use in routing traffic is vitally important to picking the winning monetisation solution.
   
6. External factors must be considered during a test. For example, if the Euro/US exchange rate alters significantly then you will get a completely different result for your test.
7. To extract the most value from traffic you need to offer the traffic to zero click solutions in a live auction environment (sub 100 milliseconds) and then backfill with parking and affiliate programs.
8. The goal of intelligently switching traffic to "chase" the winning solution is as much about cost minimisation as about revenue maximisation. For example, if I am paid $1 for a piece of traffic and test it elsewhere and I'm now paid $0.80 then that information just cost me 20 cents. How you do this and minimise your costs is critical to portfolio management.
   
9. Never forget that your time has a cost associated with it.....most domain owners value their time at $0/hour.
10. If it all seems really complicated then it actually is. Anyone can park a domain but not many people can extract every penny out of the traffic.

I hope that these points help some of you get the most value from your own domain traffic.
For full disclosure I'm one of the founders of ParkLogic and writer of whizzbangsblog (8 years of domain blogging).