CSC’s Brand Advisory Team is comprised of Marketing, Legal, and IT specialists. In our domain name related strategies, we highlight 4 best practices for Corporate Domain Name Management. In Part 1 of this series, the Director of CSC’s Global Brand Advisory Team, Vincent D’Angelo highlighted the options for re-deploying budget by considering releasing domains in low risk extensions and looking at registering domains in higher risk extensions that have not already been considered.
In Part 2 we will look at the other components: How 3rd party infringements impact on traffic diversion and paid search costs and ensuring your current domain inventory is doing the most it can to drive traffic.
CSC recommend’s identifying high-impact third-party infringements that are responsible for traffic diversion and increasing paid search costs. In this process, we will look towards the most common relevant terms that infringers will use to leech traffic away from a company’s brand. Also, we look towards how a brand is searched – which can assist us in determining keyword rich domains registered by 3rd parties that are capitalizing on direct navigation traffic diversion.
If you do a Google search on “eBay USA“, you would expect that the first page is riddled with direct links to eBay’s websites – which is the case. However, eBay is also paying for a sponsored link at the top of the page and the estimated CPC value for them is $0.61. However, they are not the registered holder of the domain ebayusa.com – which currently points to Go Daddy’s parking page. The term get’s searched globally at 368,000 times per month and even if a conservative number of people use the direct navigation approach, there goes a sizable number of potential visitors to eBay’s site.
Whilst a company cannot possibly go after EVERY 3rd party registered domain that contains your brand, CSC’s unified monitoring services combined with strategic analysis from the Global Brand Advisory Team can help you prioritize the most egregious infringements to the top of the pile so your team is focused on the domains that are impacting you the most.
Whether or not you have deadwood in your portfolio, if the domains inventory is not pointing to relevant content, they are not in any position to contribute. If you look at the domains portfolio as employees – would you pay an employee to sit around and do nothing – or are you expecting them to do their part in contributing to the success of the brand and the company’s goals? Ensuring that domains point to relevant content is imperative to your success.
Now, there are legitimate reasons (like tax , legal and regulatory) why “some” domains may be kept quiet but submitting your inventory to a live site analysis will reveal which domains are not doing their part. In our eBay example, forwarding everything over to eBay.com is not considered “relevant” for many circumstances. eBay has international and targeted product pages, so ebaymotors.com should point to motors.ebay.com. eBayFrance.com should go to ebay.fr – which they do. However, a couple of generic domains – like ebaynews.com and ebaylistings.com are not live.
Ebaynews.com should forward to http://announcements.ebay.com/ – this is an easy fix.
The eBay Foundation was established in 1998 and the current website page is located at http://www.ebayinc.com/profile/ebay_foundation and yet ebayfoundation.com does not resolve – another easy web forwarding fix.
Each client presents their own unique challenges and there is no cookie-cutter solution, but there are some best practices which provide a starting point to a conversation on what’s important to you as a company and your brands. This is why CSC’s consultative services are an integral part of CSC’s service model. This is also why CSC was ranked #1 in customer service in an independent survey by the World Trademark Review.
Quinn Taggart, Global Brand Advisory Team