Domain Metrics Study Part 1

As many of you know, I like to dig into stuff! I like to look at things from a lot of different angles. Sometimes this leads to discoveries that are uncommon and another approach to look for thing. When the topic is Domain Names, there are many metrics to consider, but is there a “set” that would help me find “the good ones”?

Well, as the title states, this is part 1 of a small series of studies and I am going to “write as I discover” and see what we find out!

So, in this research test… my mind has me wondering about a specific type of domain names.

Why are people “backordering” specific domain names via expired GoDaddy Auctions? (backordered domains have $10, 1 bid and often go to 2 bid, $15 etc)

Keyword(s) ~ This is always a key factor! Is the domain name simply backordered because of the keyword? It is almost impossible to tell this, because everybody could have a different agenda into purchasing a domain name and often times, it relates to the keyword or keywords in the domain.

With the keyword factor in mind, here are some stats:

3,323 domains have 1 bid, $10

2,434 of those domains are .com

256 .net

247 .org

Using my dictionary tool ZipZing, the numbers are not really telling me a huge split as: 6 domains are one word, 471 are 2 word, 499 are 3 word, 48 popular and 2,219 combine as “other”.

Not surprising, the biggest thing we learned here, .com is king!

179 domains have 2 bids, $15 price (separate list from above)

A very similar break down with 135 of the 179 being .com domains. 1, 1 word domain, 25, 2 word domains and 39 three word domains.

29 domains have 3 bids, $20 price. (separate list from above)

24 of the domains are .com with 2, 2 word domains, 3, 3 word, 2 popular and 16 “other” domains.

Using DRT, I ran a basic scan of all the 2,434 .com domains that have 1 bid, $10 current price. I really figured I would see a common pattern here and see something that stuck out as to why people are backordering these domains.. but not to spoil the surprise, I don’t think I did!

Here are a few interesting thing:

• Average domain “length” was 13 characters
• Average creation date was 9/10/2010 (4 years old). I thought this would be higher!
• 267 domains had at least search volume of 6 or greater. 932 was the average search volume, removing the highest and lowest. Again, I thought search volume would have been one of the reasons for the bo.
• 17 domains had “high” search ad competition. 33 had medium. Again, nothing glaring but I have used this metric in the past to help me sort a list.

Factors not looked at, but may be a player:

GoDaddy Valuation. GoDaddy puts bull shit (IMO) “valuations” on basically any domain name that has a whisper of “traffic”. People bid crazy amounts based on traffic numbers displayed by GD and by the “valuation” amount. I have never seen these numbers really play out. They never get the traffic GD states (mainly because the traffic numbers are from “30 days ago” when the domain first expired. Is a lot of that traffic from bots?

Links, DMOZ, Registered TLD’s, Google Search Returns, Keywords registered… these are several other key factors that I didn’t compare, as I do not have an easy, bulk way to compare them! I do think the metrics of these would play some role, but I also do not think there would be a light bulb on one of them.

Looking at the above data, this is what I think I learned:

• .com
• 13 characters or less
• 4 years or older
• Keyword/Speculation/Unknown will always be a big consideration and is hard to track! Why some people buy domains, who is buying and so many more factors will often be the biggest metric we do know.

Up next?

I am going to take a look at some reported domain name sales, using some of the metrics above, but I am also going to try and include some more metrics/data that I didn’t here. I hope to find something that “sticks out” more than the common… like “.com”. I think we did learn a couple things here, but nothing glaring that I hoped.