Frank Schilling is one of the hardest working people in the Domain Industry. As I've reported here previously over the 6 - 7 month's, he has been making a lot of changes to hundreds of thousands of his domains in trying to squeeze out better conversion rates by experimenting with content, more click through's by providing thumbnails next to the PPC ads and so on. Here we are once again and I have more changes to report in regards to the domain parking monetization setup that is deployed across all of his domain names.
It's nothing really big. Nothing that you probably would notice even.. But it sure does make a difference to the bottom line. As you can see on the screen shot above, the color of the links is not green anymore. It is the same color as the description. Frank Schilling has ditched the green and went all black. But why you ask? It's rather simple. Visitors don't usually spend more than a few seconds scanning a page, looking for information, whatever it is they need. Having different colors is usually a distraction and those aren't good :)
That is why you want to keep things simple and have the text that is most important jump out right at you, and that would be the title. It is something like 3, 4 or 5 words long maximum and it pretty much summarizes what the ad is all about. The users spot the PPC ad's title that they feel has something to offer which they need and click on it.
I've found this setup to work very well and increase click through rates by at least double digits across the Google AdSense custom search engine setup that I've been deploying on my own sites for a couple of years now, as well as on many clients websites of course.
It's the little stuff that counts. A lot of times of course it gets overlooked, but you have to continue to try to "optimize" your setup. You have to continue to try and improve your conversions and click troughs if you are dealing with PPC. Even if Frank Schilling increased it by 5% lets say.. Imagine how much this has added to the bottom line? Well, I can tell you exactly. It would be roughly $1,000,000 per year since Frank Schilling makes something like 20 million off his domains according to reliable domain industry insiders and various sources.
Now, we also have Navigation Catalyst Systems.. They have close to 700,000 domains... Big operation and heavily backed by another well funded company that has been staying on top of this stuff for over 5 years now. Of course they don't have the best generic types of keyword domains, but they do receive a lot of traffic. Mostly because they are all typos and they have domain typos of everything and I mean everything.
Anyway's... They are filling up the parked page with double the PPC ads. On the main hotspot, as you can see to the left, the PPC ads are being displayed as if they were "organic results" because there is no notice saying they are "sponsored" results, instead the same ads are displayed in the right column, at about 25% of the space of the entire page. Pretty clever setup, don't you think? I am sure this has increased the PPC click through rates by at least 10 - 20%!!
I am not sure how or why Yahoo approved this type of setup, but hey... The money must be real good, so they turn the blind eye... Nobody cares?! Or wait, they do care, but they care about the $$$! They don't care about all the rules being broken and advertisers getting worthless visitors / clicks. Yahoo's ad distribution sucks so bad because of stuff like this.
While Frank Schilling's 400,000 domains generate GREAT traffic off of mostly generic and targeted keyword domains, Navigation Catalyst Systems 700,000 domains more than likely cancel that out. It's too bad, but what else is new? Round and round we go. The domain industry is so full of it... Lots of opportunities. Lots of bullshit too. It is the way it always has been and will be.
Observations at WannaDevelop.com
02/23/2010: Dozens of Amazon affiliate stores for sale.. Developed by DomainMassDevelopment.com 01/11/2010: Wanna be part-owner of DomainState.com with myself and a few others? Ok, read this now... 11/02/2009: FS gets it on with WP... It's about time, no??!?! 08/24/2009: If all else fails... Who is gonna pay the bills?!! 08/22/2009: Frank Schilling has the winning formula $$$$$$
