Expired Domains

Judging the value of expired domains that you plan on registering or bidding for at domain auctions, can be a guessing game. But if you understand the basics of how to the internet works, how sites pass on traffic, and how which available tools can be used to estimate traffic, and how much advertisers are will to pay for related targetted traffic, then you can get a pretty good idea of what kind of value to put on a domain prior to owning it.

Tools to use:

The Wayback archive

Use the Wayback archive to see how a domain looked in the past, weather it was a developed website, what it was used for, what products were sold there, or what information was provided.

Check linkpop

Linkpop is the total sum of links on other active websites that are pointing to any web page or domain.

Overture with the extension

The overture keyword selector tool shows how many times anyone made a search in one of a few major search engines for the specific domain during the previous month.

Overture without the extension

The overture keyword selector tool shows how many times anyone made a search in one of a few major search engines for the specific terms that make up the domain during the previous month.

Google pagerank also known as Google pr

Google PageRank assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives by links from other websites.

Alexa ratings

Alexa.com ranks websites by the amount of visitors (using the alexa toolbar) to a website. The websites are ranked from 1 to about 6 million.

These tools can all be used to improve your estimate of expected traffic. After using all of the above to research the domain, you should check the accuracy of the linkpop, and also check the estimated traffic of websites that are linking to the expired domain. Once you have made your guess at estimated number of visitors per day the domain should recieve, and figured out what products the visitors are targetted towards, you should then use the Overture Bid Tool to see what advertisers are paying for targetted traffic. Although some traffic converts a lot better than others, until you own the domain, you will never know for sure how many visitors will actually convert to clicks. I normally lowball my estimated click through percentage to 5%.

Example: domain1.com
So let’s say you figure domain1.com recieves 100 unique visitors per day, using an estimated 5% clickthrough rate, gives you 5 clicks per day.

The top 3 paying advertisers are paying overture an average of $1.00 per click

Most PPC’s recieve 50% of the advertising bid, and split 50% of that with you. Paying you $0.25 per click for this keyword.

Here is the most important part of judging the value of a domain. Is the expired domain recieving traffic from mostly incoming links from other websites or mostly from people typing the domain into their browser in search of products.

If the domain in question is recieving traffic from mostly links, search engines, and bookmarks, then the traffic could conceivably dry up in a shorter period of time than typein domains.

Linkpop domains (previously developed sites) are generally valued at between 18-24 months revenue, and typein domains are generally values at between 36-60 months revenue.

The example domain (domain1.com) would then have the following estimated value according to my formula.
If it is a linkpop domain: $135-180
If it is a typein domain: $270-450

The above example is based on using a major ppc provider such as domain sponsor or fabulous, but if you have a direct pertnership with google or overture, the domain could yeild a better return and be worth more to you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 11:58 am and is filed under Now is the time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.