How to double your Google
click-thru rate!
Dear Friend and Subscriber,
This transcript excerpt is from a call originally recorded on March 7th, 2006 with Perry Marshall, Jonathan Mizel, and Glenn Livingston. The topic is important to everyone who buys Pay-Per-Click traffic, especially from Google.
In this article, you will learn how to use display URL tricks, and one technique in particular, to increase click-through rate and reduce traffic costs.
Sincerely,
Jules Stevens
Editor, The Online Marketing Letter
Jonathan Mizel: This is Jonathan Mizel
Perry Marshall: This is Perry Marshall
Glenn Livingston: And this is Glenn Livingston
Jonathan Mizel: Many of you know Perry and I, but you may not have heard of Glenn Livingston. We’ve been working with Glenn for a while and he handled a lot of the technical aspects of this project and taught us the technique we’ll discuss today. Perry, please give a little introduction and tell us how this whole technique started.
Perry Marshall: Normally, I’m not big on tricks and little whiz-bang techniques. I’m more interested in principles, because techniques change but principles don’t. However, sometimes we encounter things that are so good that you just have to tell your best customers. This is definitely one of those situations.
We are going to describe a specific technique and we are going to describe a variety of strategies to use around it that can dramatically increase your click-thru rates. This came about through a combination of my round table members sharing ideas. We quickly proved this is a very reliable way to increase response and reduce cost. One advertiser who spends about two to three thousand dollars a day on Google got a little more then twice as much traffic for the same cost. I think that is something you can’t underestimate the power of.
About three years ago, I was working on a project to get a web product off the ground in a very competitive market. I identified a technique that tripled my click-thru rate and used it for about three or four months. It was just enough time to give me enough traffic and statistics and opportunity to tweak my sales process to reach critical mass.
A slight increase in conversion, click-thru rate, opt-in, on an order form or whatever it might be, can create a tipping point that makes your business grow quickly.
Quite some time ago I was listening to an interview with Jonathan, describing the ‘unlimited traffic technique’ which is basically the idea that, once you get to where the average visitor coming to your website produces more sales than the average visitor going to any of your competitors websites, you’re now the most profitable guy on the block. You can afford to pay a little bit more for the Google Ads, a little bit more for the Overture, a little more for banner ads, affiliates make a little bit more.
Affiliates start promoting it and they make more money with you than anyone else they can promote so they send you more and more traffic. That’s how you become the 800 pound gorilla in your market, whatever your market is. Jonathan, keep going here, because everyone wants to know what we are talking about.
Jonathan Mizel: The days when you could come in and dominate a market just by putting a headline on your sales letter are gone. Smarter people are in the game. Now, we are simply looking for incremental increases in traffic. It doesn’t take that much to be the number one Google producing ad. Perry, if you have twenty people, and they’re all bidding a dollar for a click, the ones who are better advertisers are going to rise to the top, right?
Perry Marshall: Yeah, if you get the higher click –thru rate, either the higher you move in position or the more you can cut back your bid price and so there’s definitely a multiplier factors. So if your click-thru rate is ten or twenty percent better than the other guy, it makes a difference.
Jonathan Mizel: Especially now, with people using things like traffic arbitrage techniques, where they’re buying traffic from one place and sending it to a site with, say Google AdSense, or affiliate programs or something like that on it. Quite often, people do a test like that and they’ll spend a dollar to make a dollar, which doesn’t really make sense. The real way that that starts to work, is when you can spend a dollar to make a dollar thirty or dollar forty or dollar fifty.
Believe me when we heard about this Google technique, and started to look at some of the results, we got very, very excited because this is that extra edge you would need to beat out a competitor to be number one, to successfully use traffic arbitrage.
If you’re looking for the edge, this is a super edge. Let me explain the technique. Basically, there are three critical elements of the Google AdWords ad. There’s the headline, there’s the body copy and there’s the display URL. Now, just about everybody (with the exception of Perry) is telling you the only thing you need to focus on is your headline and your body copy. The truth is, the second most important line in your Google ad, according to our test, is actually the display URL. Perry, we talked about this extensively in the tele-seminar we did a couple of years ago. And we were just toying around with it, saying the domain does make a difference.
Perry Marshall: Right.
Jonathan Mizel: Then you said you could capitalize, if it was bestcarreviews.com, you could capitalize the b, c and r and even now, that would give you a bump. That was really when you started to realize how important the display URL was.
Perry Marshall: Yeah, and at that time, I didn’t fully appreciate it. A little later on, it kind of crystallized and I began to see it makes a huge difference. It’s the second most important thing in the ad, because it matters to people a great deal, where they’re going.
Jonathan Mizel: There is credibility in a URL. When we look at the URL as searchers, as people who use Google as a search engine, we look at where it is going to take us.
Perry Marshall: It’s the last thing you check before you go there.
Jonathan Mizel: Right, exactly. Well, we’ve done extensive testing. We’ve added sub domains and directories, and dashes and capitalization and all the stuff Perry teaches in his course and you guys are probably using. But, we discovered something else, something new.
If you’re searching for dog information and there’s Billy Bobs Vet Care dot com and then there is dogs.com, you’re going to tend to gravitate towards the dogs.com domain. There is something else that is really important about a display URL. It’s the only part of the ad you actually own. Someone can rip off your headline. Someone can steal your body copy. Hey, they could steal your offer, your sales letter. The one thing they can’t take away from you is your domain name. It’s really critical.
We discovered an intriguing way to get the credibility of a primary, short, keyword domain and boost your click-thru rate too. The fact is, we discovered something fascinating.
Now, let me explain how Google works. When you enter in your ad, you enter in your headline, you enter in your body copy and then you enter in your display URL.
Now, with dogs as an example, if you’re own dogs.com, you can advertise www.dogs.com or you can just put dogs.com in there. Very important you understand, you can leave out, in Google’s system, the “www.”
Now, if dogs is taken, you can buy the domain, www-dogs.com. The technical URL for that is www.www-dogs.com, but because Google lets you leave off the www’s, it looks like www-dogs.com in your browser. The thing is, if you have the domain www-dogs.com, people react to it as if it were dogs.com and it gives you massive URL credibility. In most cases, the click-through rate goes up. Especially, in competitive niches.
Let’s think about the implications of this www dash trick. If you can get a hold of the dash version of the main keyword of your business, of your niche, or, another high volume keyword phrase, you can more then likely increase your click through rate when using Google. In many cases, by a hundred, two hundred, three hundred percent. Glenn, what was the example that you found.
Glenn Livingston: I increased it by nine times for a client of mine.
Jonathan Mizel: You increased it 900%.
Glenn Livingston: Yes, I did.
Jonathan Mizel: Now, the domain name that you were competing against must have been a pretty bad domain name. <chuckle>
Glenn Livingston: It was okay.
Jonathan Mizel: It was okay, but it certainly wasn’t as good as the www dash primary keyword domain.
Glenn Livingston: Right.
Jonathan Mizel: It was one ninth as good. If you already have a main keyword domain, it’s important to get the dash version of that domain.
Let’s look at the case studies. We tried to be, to give you a good idea of what this really is going to produce. We decided to just lay it out and test it and make sure that it worked. Glenn, you were the primary driver of these tests. Can we go through the handout right now and take a look at these case studies?
Glenn Livingston: The first one that I’m looking at is for microwave ovens. I wanted to go up against a major brand name, so I choose SharpUSA and I sent them some traffic. I also sent traffic to a URL that we bought, which was, www-microwave.com.
Perry Marshall: Brand names, tend to have a lot of gravity. SharpUSA, everybody knows Sharp makes microwaves. So, SharpUSA is a good domain name.
Glenn Livingston: Yeah. It was difficult to beat. You certainly can’t go out and buy “www-sharp.com” without infringing on a trademark. What I did was, test it on pure Google traffic, so we would have the cleanest traffic source and ran them both at the exact same time for the exact same number of exposures, as exact as Google can get. You see the dash version of the domain name gets a 10.9% click through, where the only difference is the domain. The SharpUSA gets a 6.2% click through.
Underneath that, there’s a little bit of math that shows you what that might be worth to an average bidder on Google. If you skip down, Column A says what the control, or the non-dash version gets. Row B says what the test got. Row C is the percent improvement, if you take the test and divide it by the control, that’s what you’d get. Then you see the volume, which you can get at http://inventory.overture.com
This is what it was the last time we checked, which was about a month ago. The third bid price, and the reason, is very important. When we started to do this, we got very excited about all the domains that had the absolute highest bid price and then we realized that, it wasn’t really a function of the bid price alone, it was a function of the volume times the bid price. So that would represent the total inventory.
If you would assume, I am now to Row F, if you would assume that an advertiser who was getting a 6.2% click thru, which is what the control got, SharpUSA. If they were getting that and they exposed their ad to all of the inventory that was available for the year, that they’d be paying about 18 grand over the course of the year.
Assuming that they wanted a reduction in cost, as opposed to, getting 75% more traffic, about how much of a reduction would they get.
That next row, Row G, is proportional to our best approximation of what Google does. Nobody really knows exactly what Google does to determine their cost, but we’re pretty sure it’s proportional to the inverse of the increase in the click through rate. In other words, if you were to double your click through rate, we think that you’d be paying about half the price for traffic. Perry, does that make sense to you?
Perry Marshall: Yeah. There are other little factors that they throw in, but this is approximately correct.
Glenn Livingston: Okay, so we’d wanted to come up with an approximate formula for valuation and then if you take the difference between what this bidder would pay with SharpUSA.com verses the dash version of microwave.com. Per year, that bidder would hypothetically save about $7800 a year and a three-year value would be about twenty-three grand. Let’s go to the next example, so you can see that even when you’re less than doubling the click through, you’re really getting a very intense bump in the value of the domain itself.
Jonathan Mizel: I want to make sure people understand, if you go up against Sharp with the same ad, and the www dash domain, you will be above them. You will not only be getting more clicks for paying a lower price, but you will appear above their ad in Google.
Glenn Livingston: Yes, you could choose not to take the reduction in price and you could let Google move you up, so that you get more traffic and feed sales.
Perry Marshall: You know Glenn, there’s one other thing. You’re basing this data on Overture. Not Google. Google usually gets more traffic than overture and always gets more traffic for anything technical or propeller head or research oriented, or anything like that. But generally, Google’s got more traffic than overture, so the $7800 a year, that’s based on overtures quantities and traffic, it would usually be more on Google.
Jonathan Mizel: And if you’re using this technique in multiple places, and we’ve discovered some other places to use it. This is an exponential increase in credibility and clicks and a reduction in traffic. Really, this particular trick applies to the entire advertising arena.
Glenn Livingston: What you are both saying is that, the numbers that you see here are a conservative estimate of the value?
Jonathan Mizel: That’s right, and we wanted to keep it conservative because, we want to make sure this will work for others. So, not only are the case studies conservative, the numbers in them are conservative. These domains could be worth significantly more, if you are aggressively buying traffic.
Glenn Livingston: Let’s go to the next one for pianos. This is a case where we doubled the click through rate. And if you walk through the same math, you’ll see that even on a lower value keyword, the value of the domain enhancement is still significant.
Let’s go to the next one. In bookkeeping, we had only a 45% increase and we’re still getting about a $20,000 value of the domain. And I’m showing you some of these lower bid price domains so that you can see you don’t need a very large increase in order to get value from it.
Let’s go to the next one. When you start to get to the higher volume keywords, you can get a value that’s a lot more, even with a lower click through. For dentists, we only got about a 50% bump, a 45% bump. But, because there’s 825,000 searches a month, the domain’s worth over a $100,000 in our estimation.
Jonathan Mizel: Delta Dental is probably one of the strongest (at least in the West Coast) one of the strongest dental brands out there. So, this is beating, not only something with the keyword, but also, the brand and the keyword.
Glenn Livingston: What I find is it really works in the competitive niches and it doesn’t necessarily work in niches that aren’t as competitive. I tried it in my guinea pig niche and I didn’t get a bump at all.
Note: Although the vast majority of case studies showed a definite and significant bump in click through rate, there were situations, particularly in less-competitive niches where the domains did not increase clickthrough. though in no case did the track hurt response. Each specific domain should be watched closely during initial tests. It is not advisable to advertise any domain at ‘full throttle’ without first achieving statistically reliable results in an initial test period.
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Glenn Livingston: Think of the same principle that works with 800 numbers. Where trust is required and you see an 800 number, it kind of implies that business must have been around for a while and they know what they’re doing and they managed to stake their ground early on in the game.
So, when you get into a market like dentists or you’ll see digital cameras next, or anything that’s very competitive, and there’s a trust factor, the domain credibility plays a larger factor than it does in a non-competitive niche.
Jonathan Mizel: These were your own niches and your own promotion, where you used this trick. What kind of numbers did you see as an increase?
Glenn Livingston: I’ve seen everything from a 40% increase all the way up to the nine times increase I told you about. Some of the greater values are associated with some of the domains that don’t get a gigantic increase, but they’re so competitive and so expensive, the small increase is worth a fortune.
In the digital camera example you see we only have a 35% increase. But when you do the math, it’s $700,000. Jonathan, you were asking, what if we had tested web conferencing, or something $10 or $15 a click with a lot of volume? The math just gets larger and larger. And those are actually the domains that I’m a little more excited about.
Perry Marshall: Yep. Glenn showed you the numbers. If you own www-digitalcameras.com, which has a 35% better click through rate than shop digital online, you save $231,000 a year, based on overture traffic.
This is pixel power here. Every pixel in that little ad makes a difference, every character, every word. And if you’re paying a buck, two or three bucks a click. If you’re getting hundred of thousands of clicks a year, you better do this.
Jonathan Mizel: The low hanging domain fruit is gone. But this www dash trick has got the biggest impact of any domain name modification we have seen outside of owning the www dot domain, most of which are well gone.
Perry Marshall: I’ve known about this for a long time and I didn’t want to tell anybody. At some point, this is going to get out. So, it better be my customers that find out about it first, instead of everybody else.
Jonathan Mizel: Let’s talk about who should be using this technique. Obviously anybody who’s a pay per click advertiser in Google, even in Overture, should be using this technique. Especially, since the potential for competition is great. If you’re in a niche or a portal marketer, you need to lock in your niche now, before a competitor does.
Anybody who has got a niche site, or is doing some sort of search engine or a portal, or just a content site looking to bring people in so that you can monetize them with affiliate programs or what not. This is important… If you’re a domain name speculator. If you buy domains and you resell them. Or, you buy them and you use them, hey, these are some fine properties you could pick up now. Especially, since people don’t have any idea quite yet what the value of these names will be.
Glenn Livingston: Suppose you could pick up a name like, homemortgages.com or something like that, but the dash version. If you could do a set of tests the way that I just showed you, and do a little value calculation, you could call all of the top better lenders on Google for home mortgages and set up a little auction. Tell them that on a specific day you going to auction that one domain.
Jonathan Mizel: You could be a traffic broker, in other words.
Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
Perry Marshall: Plus, you could test this, their domain verses yours, apples to apples in the same space and prove it to them. Your domain with these words gets a 3.4% click through rate and mine gets 5.6%.
Jonathan Mizel: Forget selling it, you could lease it out. You could lease it for six months or a year and you could actually lease it out to the highest bidder. You wouldn’t even have to give the control of the domain over, you would just redirect it to the appropriate server of the person paying you the most money.
Perry Marshall: The coaching member that used this technique, this one thing was for the last year or so the decisive difference between him and all his other competitors, which there are about 200 of. This has been the most significant edge he has for internet advertising.
This is a way of giving yourself another extra 20, 30, 50, 100% margin on your advertising costs, in terms of an improvement and then having more time and more breathing room to get things right.
This is something you don’t want your competitors to have. You just don’t. Even if you hate this technique. You should at least go buy the domains, so nobody else can use them.
Jonathan Mizel: I’ve got a great story about a consulting client, a company called Telecare, a long-distance company. The year was 1996 and the guy wanted the domain name “TeleCare,” and he couldn’t get it because someone already had it. He was furious and he was going to take legal action. Well, I realized, I could get the domain name longdistance.com. So, I got longdistance.com and I gave it to him and he was upset and he still wanted to take legal action. Well, I’ll tell you what the domain name “long distance” is worth significant dollars. I talked to him about 4-5 years ago and he said that someone had just offered him, I believe it was one million dollars. He said the smartest thing that he ever did, was not get the name of his company as his domain.
Perry Marshall: Now that should be obvious to anybody that has really been around the block a few times, but who knows how many Fortune 500 companies would fail to grasp this. You could be their affiliate and get traffic for a fifth as much money and make money.
Jonathan Mizel: If you’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine you have probably heard the domain name rush has started again. Wall Street has gotten hip to this stuff. Type in traffic domains have started to take off. There was a story about a guy that bought the domain name candy.com. Paid $108,000 for it and his partners thought he was crazy, but it makes $300 a day. So it paid for itself in 14 months and now it’s a cash cow. So, we think there is a significant opportunity in www dash domains. And because this is the only part of the ad you own, this is it. They can steal your headline, they can steal your copy, but they cannot steal your domain name.
There are a couple risks, and there are a couple of things to keep in mind with this particular strategy. Glenn, are you prepared to go over some of them?
Glenn Livingston: Sure, one of them we already talked about, which is in the competitive markets, in the ones that we showed you, we’re finding a bump 72% of the time. That means there’s is also a risk you might not get a bump, because 28% is a reasonable proportion. And it’s also not very effective when the market isn’t competitive. I think we talked about that.
Perry Marshall: So, in other words. Trust really should be a factor.
Glenn Livingston: Trust should really be a factor. But it’s still a risk anyway. We talked about the importance of trademarks, so you can’t use this to circumvent a trademark-able term like www-yahoo.com. But when I talked to my attorney, he gave the example of movies. He said that if you go to movies.com, you will notice that there is no trademark claim on movies.com, because you can’t trademark a generic word like that. But, it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to register www-Google.com. That would be kind of a mess.
Perry Marshall: That was going to be my rival search engine.
Glenn Livingston: (laughter)
Jonathan Mizel: Probably of all the ones you could register, the www-Google.com one would be the worst one.
Glenn Livingston: Yeah. (laughter) How to get the Google monster on top of you quickly.
This is the opposite of branding. This is not something that you do to get name recognition because you want people to type in your URL on the browser. It’s only valuable in places where you’re going to show the clickable link, like in Google or in Overture or even on a banner, a banner network or something like that, that you talked about. This is not a branding technique, and it’s not something that you build a whole site around, it’s just a way to get less expensive traffic, or get more traffic, then your competitors can.
Jonathan Mizel: Let’s take some questions…
Glenn Livingston: Probably the most frequent question that I am seeing in my email is, what happens if Google decides to change their advertising parameters. What if they don’t like this and they ban it? I don’t think that they will, because it’s comprised entirely of legal internic characters, but certainly, they could.
My view on that is, probably wouldn’t happen right away. How much competitive intelligence could you get in the mean time? One thing you could do is take the dash domain, getting traffic at a lot cheaper rate and then you could use that traffic to split test and learn what other keywords are really pulling in that market. Then you could construct a domain of those keywords to replace it. So you can get intelligence a lot cheaper then your competitors can. It’s also, entirely possible that this will go on forever, so my take on it, is it’s a risk. It’s something to consider. But there is a lot of value regardless of what happens.
Perry Marshall: That’s right.
Jonathan Mizel: We feel the same way. If Google does make a change, it probably won’t happen quickly. It would be hard to imagine Google deciding that you can no longer have a URL in your ad. But just make the www- domain it resolve to a site. There’s no redirect, there’s no nothing. I mean, you are buying the ad. The domain name does exist. You’re not infringing on anyone’s trademark. So it doesn’t seem particularly likely.
Perry Marshall: Let me just interject that, you say: Would Google do this? Well, if you use this technique and you’re getting the first or second highest click through rate of anybody. That means Google is making more money on your slot then anybody else. Google is trying to make Wall Street happy. If they’re making 50% more money because you’re doing this, are they going to stop doing it? We would like to satisfy Wall Street and give people quality user experience, well, more and more Google tends to vote for their pocketbook.
Jonathan Mizel: I was going to say, that you might even see in the ad guidelines that they recommend this in a few months. (laughter) Google is all about relevant experience for the user. If it’s relevant, if it makes sense, if it produces the revenue, they’re probably going to allow it. But of course, we want to make sure that people understand things on the internet change.
I mean at one time, you could SPAM, if you wanted to. You can’t do that anymore. This is something we believe does have legs and a couple of other places to use it are wherever the URL is visible. banner ads, contextual listings, text ads, is all a a great idea.
I think another place would be articles or content areas. You know if you have articles on a particular topic, like gardening and you got www-gardening.com, at the time of click, at the time of recognition, where the person has to make a decision, after they have read the article and now there’s a bit of credibility because they go down to the bottom of the page and they see the www dash, my guess is it’s going to work the same exact way in their mind as the pay per click ad would. They assume it has more credibility, there’s an implication you were somehow first to market it, even though the domain was just registered last week.
It feels that way, it really does. So Glenn and Perry and I did the test and we tested our niches and we had our clients test, and the results were pretty phenomenal. So, we went out and we bought a portfolio of domains, about 1800 in all. The thing is, there’s no way we can personally use all of them. So after taking out the ones that related to our own niches and projects, we still have over 1100 of them that we decided to sell off.
We got a lot of really phenomenal domains and a bunch of them are at just a few hundred bucks. If any of these domains are in your niche, or if any of these are your primary keyword, we encourage you to pick them up. They’re inexpensive and they’re going to save you some cash.
If you are not a registered GoDaddy user, I think it’s five dollars to join their site. That’s an annual fee, so it’s not a big deal. It does give you access to be able to both bid and review all of the domains that are available in the After Market right now. I think it’s one of the best After Markets we’ve seen. It’s very well organized.
Listen, we didn’t even scratch the surface here, we want to encourage you to get your own niches and use the display URL techniques we revealed today. One thing I would say is, my guess is they’ll probably go quickly. So, if you are interested in any name, especially if it’s one of the ones we have available, it’s not a lot of money to lock in this domain.
Glenn Livingston: A couple of people wanted to know the positions we used for the testing. I was bidding for the first or second position and the average was about 1.4 for the case studies that you saw. I wanted get a lot of exposures and really since the impact is largest in the competitive niches, I wanted to step up to the top. To see what would happened.
Also a couple of people wanted to know whether this would work for engineers and business to business type of things. Perry, I didn’t test that directly. Do you have any experience with clients that have done that?
Perry Marshall: I have not tested this in those markets. My hunch is it would work a little less well. The fundamental factor is, regardless of how clever your ad is, if what happens after people click isn’t what they wanted, it doesn’t help you anyway. So, some people think, here’s an easy shortcut. No, not really. It’s an edge that you get, but then you have to parlay it. So, if you own www-doctors.com or something, you better have some good doctors on your site.
Glenn Livingston: The way I like to think about that is, that it’s a multiplier and anything times zero would be zero.
Here’s a question. If you assign the www.www-domainname.com the same IP as your web site, which domain appears in the browser when the user lands there? Does it display the website display name or the www- domain name?
Jonathan Mizel: It will display it if they are set to the same server and they go there via the www-, they will arrive at the www-. When you really follow someone through the sales process, that’s not as much of a factor. Meaning that, they saw your ad, they clicked on your web page. The relevance is there, or maybe they visit the webpage opt-in and leave and then come back later, it’s not going to be an incongruent, so to speak, between the ad and the domain. Although, what Perry said is really critical. If it’s about doctors, there better the doctor stuff on there, don’t get the www-doctors and send them into the free laptop offer.
Glenn Livingston: This question is what about the www-.net domains? I thought that was an interesting question. I think the answer to that is the same as the answer to: what’s the differential value between dot net and dot com. And, I haven’t tested that directly, but what I did test was, how does the www dash do against www dot. So actually, when I tested dentists, there was a third ad that I ran to www.dentists.com. And the www dash does about 10% less, then the actual real thing. So, to the same extent that the dot net domain portrays second to market. Probably you would see the www dash dot net come in second underneath the www dash dot com domain. Does that make sense?
Jonathan Mizel: This is really the ability to get the credibility of the dot com, with a new domain. The credibility of the dot com with the almost unavailable, under any circumstances, keyword domain. You’re just not going to be able to get www.dogs.com or www.mortgage.com, you just cant do it. The people that own those domains, they’re not going to let them go.
Perry Marshall: They know Glenn’s formula too.
Glenn Livingston: Yeah, people are asking what about other characters like commas or the underscore and it’s my understanding that those aren’t legal characters in a domain name.
Jonathan Mizel: That is correct. There are only three legal type of characters. There’s numeric, alpha; numbers and letters, and dashes.
Glenn Livingston: Gotcha.
Jonathan Mizel: Now, you could put that in to your Google ad. You could try an underscore or something like that. But you’ll never resolve to a valid domain. So Google will knock you out.
Perry Marshall: People are doing this www- trick, it works and it’s largely been a secret until today.
Glenn Livingston: We didn’t invent this, in the course of buying domains and doing this research, I actually did see several hundred of them around and being used already. So, we are just bringing the opportunity to market.
Jonathan Mizel: Yeah, in fact the first time I saw it. I thought someone had made a mistake and I laughed at them, and then I didn’t even click on it. I said, oh God, what an idiot, they screwed that up.
Perry Marshall: Nope.
Glenn Livingston: There are questions about city names.
Jonathan Mizel: Oh, city names. Like www-sanfrancisco.com?
Glenn Livingston: That’s a good idea, gosh, I don’t know what…
Jonathan Mizel: That’s brilliant.
Perry Marshall: Hey, we forgot that!
Glenn Livingston: We did. (laughter)
Perry Marshall: Jonathan, it’s all your fault.
Jonathan Mizel: I know, I know. Just what we need, another 500 domains, we’re not going to be using for a project. You know, that’s a great idea, but I just want to make sure that people understand. www-sanfrancisco.com is an awesome domain for pay per click advertising, contextual advertising, banner advertising, articles, anywhere display URL is going to show.
But if you’re trying to brand something, it’s will be difficult for you to brand a www dash domain, because the natural tendency is to enter in the www dot version . So, you just do this where you need that credibility and then maybe you drive it into a domain, best rental cars in San Francisco, a long domain that has all the keywords in there, or something like that.
Perry Marshall: Definitely.
Jonathan Mizel: In the hierarchy of things, you want to remember dot coms are supreme, dot net comes second. If it’s an informational site, specifically something that could be considered no profit or education or institutional of some sort, dot org, does tend to have a bit of credibility.
Always get the dot com when possible. When you actually direct people, they opt-in to your list and then you send them to back to your website, you ultimately need a dot com name they remember.
Glenn Livingston: What about the difference in conversion rate once the customer gets to your site and sees that, the domain is the dash, as opposed to the dot?
Jonathan Mizel: That’s interesting, because in these case studies, we weren’t really able to do that. But, it’s good that we have the conversion information from your niches and Perry’s class niches and some of the people that I know.
Glenn Livingston: I make more money with the dash than without it, in my niches
Jonathan Mizel: Interesting. Perry’s clients who have been using it, specifically the guy that’s doing two to three grand a day, if it didn’t work, if the conversion was going down, he wouldn’t use it.
Perry Marshall: You have to remember, the average guy doesn’t actually know the difference between the Google search bar and his own URL.
Jonathan Mizel: I think 31% of all searches are done in the address bar and 24% of all websites are entered into the search bar. If you look at the most search for terms and I used to work with a major search engine, the number one term that people would search for was Yahoo.com.
Now, they are really not looking for it, they just want to go there, but this is how confused people are about how browsers, search bars, and even the whole internet itself works.
Perry Marshall: I went to a cyber café, a while back with a 12 year old. A young friend of mine and he does have the internet at home, but he likes to surf the internet just like all kids do, and I watched him surf the internet. He typed in Ferrari or something and he just started clicking. He clicked and he clicked and he clicked and he clicked. He didn’t know the difference between Google and Yahoo. He didn’t know the difference between the search bar and the address bar. He didn’t know the different between a paid listing and a free one. He didn’t know the difference between a banner ad and a picture. He just clicked and he clicked and he clicked. I thought, dang, this is amazing. It was scary, but that is how people do things and so this is so far below most people’s radar. I just know that this is something that works. This is something that people are starting to use and it can be a significant edge in reducing your advertising costs. You don’t want to be ignorant of this.
Jonathan Mizel: When you really start to look and extrapolate the numbers, mall numbers get really, really large, when you calculate impressions, clicks, opt-ins, sales, even lifetime value of a customer. May the wisest man win.
Perry Marshall: May the shrewdest player prevail.
Perry Marshall: Glenn, thank you and definitely a double standing ovation for Glenn, doing a whole bunch of hard-core research on this, real case studies, not made up.
Jonathan Mizel: For those of you who haven’t heard of Glenn, we expect him to be become quite a powerhouse in the industry. We’ve worked on a few projects and it’s just unbelievable the data that he comes up with, and the information he has put together. You did a really good systematic test on these domains.
Glenn Livingston: The bottom line is these are undervalued assets and by being so detail oriented, I was able to uncover these undervalued assets. Since I knew you two guys could get the word out, I thought this was the way to do it.
Jonathan Mizel: Very good. We both thank you so much, and we thank everybody reading this, too. We really appreciate you taking your time to read this and for having faith in us, also being active internet marketers.
One of the most pleasurable things we like, is when we get an email, and I bet we are going to get some emails tonight or tomorrow. People are going to go out and get a domain and immediately test it and see some really great results. Please let us know how this is working for you. I think we are going to get some real strong data on this particular technique.
Perry Marshall: Yes, we will. I look forward to seeing it.
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STATEMENT OF NON-AFFILIATION
Cyberwave, Perry Marshall and PsyTech, herein referred to as IMM, do not represent themselves to be affiliated any of the other corporations, businesses, or trademarks mentioned within for means of example.
IMM does hereby state that IMM is not now, nor has it ever been, affiliated with any company or manufacturer named on this transcription or in any produced publications or training materials. This Statement of Non-Affiliation includes, but is not limited to, any and all, products, materials, or companies. IMM also hereby states that any perceived affiliation with any such company or manufacturer is unintentional, incorrect, and erroneous. IMM hereby states that the information on this transcription and in IMM-produced publications and training materials has not been, nor should it be perceived as having been, produced by or having originated from any company or manufacturer other than IMM.
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