Where dost thou IDN traffic come from?
One of the key things I really remember from many domainers is the term “type in traffic”. Working on client campaigns online I’d probably be fired if I told them that they are getting conversions from type-ins. This would actually only lead to more work for myself if the domain is not their brand name. To be honest, to be totally honest, I don’t believe in type in traffic. I do believe in keyword redirects because of browsers. I do believe in users typing in a keyword & domain extension because they saw it before. I do not believe in people spending their day typing in a keyword, putting a domain extension at the end, pulling out their credit card & making a purchase.
Being the person running campaigns for clients & doing analytics for the results, I always look at my domains & want to see why the high traffic Japanese IDNs get their traffic. I want to share a few techniques with you to see how you can determine where your traffic is coming from.
1. In Google.co.jp & Yahoo.co.jp search for the term with the extension with & without exact quotes. Sometimes there’s a site that has a really similar name or even so the exact name. I have at least 5 .jps that some companies have gotten ASCII domains & branded the site as my IDN domain.
2. Use this tool
http://www.romaji.org/
Put in your keyword & it will give you what the letters are in Romaji (Roman alphabet). Use this to search for the keyword & extension. Also if it’s a dot jp be sure to look for .ne.jp, .co.jp also.
Sometimes a keyword does have redirect traffic because it’s just that big of a keyword. A few of my domains like Anime had over 1,500,000 search queries on Yahoo last month. I think when I first registered the domain it was an average of just over 1,000,000 queries but these kinds of keywords Apple’s safari browser still redirects to the dot com. The keywords that Yahoo queries are over 1,000,000 search queries a month will have browser redirected traffic.
This may not apply to every market but I hope you can take these techniques & make your portfolio better. After you know where you are getting traffic you may be able to optimize it’s potential.