Impact of domain on CTR and Conversion
A lot of AdWords advertisers understand the importance of a quality advert in order to get a good CTR.
CTR of course is very important since it’ll have an impact on how much one will pay per click for a given position.
However as we have seen in a previous post (http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/focusing-on-ctr-for-your-adverts-and-forgetting-conversions/) the conversion rate that the advert is getting may be even more important than the CTR.
The right approach to write an effective advert is to understand that that adverts are made of 4 lines, and not just 3. The last line (display URL) is actually as important as the other ones.
This requires registering several domains, that can even be very similar, and have them mirror the same site. Then you just write the same exact advert (the first 3 lines) with the exception of the destination URL.
In the example above, you can see that the advert is exactly the same, except that the second domain contains the word “cure”. This is a website about a cure, and we have 2 versions of the domain, one that just contain the name of the disease, and the other one that starts with cure and then has the same disease name.
To make an example it could be like: www.CureFlu.com vs. www.Flu.com. (I cannot reveal the website of the customer)
Intuitively it would be pretty hard to guess that this can make a difference (except the fact that usually shorter domains are seen as more “authoritative”) but the difference is actually measurable. The short domain has a slightly better CTR (around 10% better) and a better conversion too (30% more).
So the moral of the story is that it may actually be a very good investment to register 10 or more domains that show the same site, and test the CTR and the conversion. In a very competitive area with low margins the domain itself may make the difference between making a profit and making a loss.
Wow. So many details. Should I choose always short named domains?
In general there are 2 rules:
- credibility
- relevancy
The domain should be related to the topic (so aaa.com won’t do it) and it should also be credible (cars.com is better than cars-for-sale-now.com).
Usually shorter domains are seen as having more credibility as their inventory is limited and people probably unconsciously understand that they are more valuable.