location + direct navigation = money
I’m doing some work for a company called SnapNames here in Portland, Oregon. I’m lucky, because they’re in a part of doing business online that has been foreign to me, domain names. It’s an emerging market and likely to grow in a huge way. SnapNames was a pioneer in the market, and now operates the largest auction of expired and deleting domain names.
(i.e. I can’t get janetjohnson.com because some guy in the UK bought it when I let it expire. Lucky I have a short middle name. I can register with SnapNames to get it back if he lets it go when it expires in January of next year…)
With all the attention and money paid to search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), marketers should begin to think about an emerging trend among web users, called ‘direct navigation’ or ‘type-ins’.
Direct navigation simply means that if I’m looking for Las Vegas real estate, I might just type in www.lasvegasrealestate.com into my browser. How many times have we all done that?
- According to Verisign, for the first time in 2005, people who were looking for something online typed in a guess at a domain name in order to find relevent content more than 50% of the time.
Not only is that a fundamental shift in online behavior, consider this:
- Direct navigation site results generated higher click-through conversions (4.23%) than paid search conversions (2.30%); according to WebSide Story.
- Direct navigation search is one area of search that is growing at an astounding rate of more than 35% - to an estimated $1B advertising business in 2007; according to ThinkEquity Partners‘ Advertising Industry Report, published in Sept. 2006.
So what should marketers do about this direct navigation trend? For one thing, they should look at which domain names they own, and whether they own domains that their prospects might type in when looking for their product. Here’s a recent article on CNNMoney about the whole notion.
Have a look at the search terms that you routinely pay for PPC ads. Could you buy the URL to that term or phrase? If you can, do.
I’ll talk about how to make enough money to offset your PPC costs in an upcoming post on ‘parking.’ Another new concept worth noting. At least, to me!
[…] Janet Johnson, formerly of Marqui, is back in the blogosphere with a newly designed site and an interesting post on the phenomenon of direct navigation, in which users guess at a URL instead of using Google, Yahoo, Ask or another search engine. […]
[…] No, I discovered it when I was reading Janet Johnson’s article on “type-ins.” I clicked through to the CNNMoney article she referenced, and up came the story, complete with one of the Apple computer personification ads with the sound turned off. It gives the opportunity to click to hear the sound, but otherwise it’s just another graphic on the page. […]