IDN Domains Talk

.Co was a perfect example of a Retargeting campaign

Many domainers don’t know what retargeting is. I’m sure you’ve experienced it though.

When I wrote a post comment on Elliot’s Blog I wrote about the potential of retargeting. Unfortunately most domainers don’t know what it is or how effective it is.

I’ll use the .Co strategy as an example.

1. They buy ads on domain related sites using their ad tracking software.
2. You click on an ad just once, just once.
3. The .co site or even some other domain related site adds a tracking pixel to your computer.
4. Other sites even non domaining related sites you visit start to display .Co advertisements.

Since you see these ads all the time you start thinking they must be spending LOADS of money on marketing.
Actually not necessarily. They are spending wisely. They only targeted domainers.
Domainers get the impression that the whole world is viewing the ads as much as they are.
The whole world wasn’t targeted that’s why the average Joe doesn’t know .co exists.
Also for banner ads they only pay when you click them.
Domainers just saw ads but didn’t click if it’s Ad Networks.
Site sponshorship for domain blogs etc is usually pretty cheap for advertisers because it’s a set monthly rate.

Anyway this is my retargeting 101. A strategy for success. It made many domainers THINK .Co advertised to the world. Which it didn’t.

.Co has just opened registration for the general public. While writing this blog & sometimes looking at domaining blogs now I realize I one strange thing.

As with IDNs I believe an extension or a domain type can be popular with usage. I do not think that 100,000 new domains going straight to parking makes a domain extension successful. I’ve read that the company went all out to promote this extension. I think otherwise.

In my previous post I wrote wouldn’t it be wonderful if a domain extension was created & was marketed to people to use them? Like .canon being tied to an online service.

Wouldn’t it make sense if the .Co team actually wanted the domains to be used they would market it to people who really develop sites, or do web marketing. If you turn off the domaining part of your brain & look at marketing blogs, agency blogs I don’t see a single blurb or dollar spent on advertising. I do see they mainly covered every site domainers go to. This gives the impression that they massively promoted the extension.

Only going to domainers looks like it will make .Co another dot Mobi to be. Time will tell but I don’t see this as any major extension “yet”. There are services that I really love, some I dislike but I don’t want to influence anyone to invest in anything I believe they will eventually loose money on.

I would have been convinced if they even had ads on SitePoint.com, SERoundtable.com, or even digitalpoint.

Even with IDNs I personally don’t think my time online is as valuable as the time I spend going out with people working in Ad Agencies to talk about domain marketing.

I was looking through the .co registry to see what my clients have registered for their brands & noticed their is an IDN converter. To feed by curiosity it did not convert anything Japanese. Please, Please, Please let one of you folk develop a highly well defined site with the term for Anime in Japanese & market it to Japanese. I’ll even give you updated Overture stats for the term.

Oh & my clients did get their brand names. With this I realize new extensions just cost brands more per year. Let’s maximize .net, .org, even .us before thinking we NEED a new extension.