discuss The Big Lie in the Domain Industry, Traffic Stats

[oldtimer]

I have been mainly using Sedo and Godaddy parking and sales landers for the past few months and was kind surprised by the number of unique visitors that I was getting considering the very low number of offers or lack thereof for the majority of my domains. Even the offer page views at Sedo were way up there for a lot of my domains while receiving no offers at all on them.

At Sedo I had about 450k unique visitors in the past 12 months on my portfolio of around 1000 domains and some of my domains had consistent offer page views over 50 per month without receiving any offers.

Godaddy doesn’t currently offer stats on sales landers, but they provide very inflated traffic stats on Godaddy Auctions.

Finally I decided to use Parking Crew for my domains and from what I can see the traffic stats for unique visitors and offer page views seem to be more realistic.

I like the fact that Parking Crew still allows me to use Afternic and Sedo sales landers which I like to switch around between occasionally.

My question is if Parking Crew can provide true stats why can’t Sedo and Godaddy and although most experienced domainers know that these stats are mostly from bots, but isn’t that going to be misleading to end users or even new domainers who rely on these false stats to make a domain purchase.

This situation can not be allowed to go on any longer.

We need to have true and accurate stats throughout the Domain Industry.

IMO

Thread Rules:

Everyone’s opinion is welcomed as long as it’s on topic and that things are kept on the professional, constructive, and respectful side. Constructive criticism for the purpose of pointing out the flaws in the domain Industry is allowed, but keep all negative, insulting, rude, and hateful comments out of this thread.

Disclaimer: I am not afflicted with or work for anyone in the Domain Industry.

 

[poweredbyme]

Geo location is one of the tons of factors.
A parking company with servers in Germany are going to report different traffic numbers than another parking company with servers in California. The chances of this is very close to 100%. Because server location matters a lot from technical perspective. Anycast? It has its own problems, can never be the perfect solution.

Any traffic data you have will always be less than the actual traffic.

@oldtimer , any profit oriented company will try to max profit and you are looking for an industry wide solution. This is not rational. Because an industry consist of companies which compete each other. How do they compete if they reveal all of their experiences, all data the they collect for long years? That's why private companies have trade secrets and each company has its own way of doing the same business in the same industry. We, as domainers, have freedom of choice, we can choose any provider and dump the ones which don't work. That's the solution you are looking for. I would be careful when asking for an industry wide solution, as someone else may ask for the same thing in the industry you operate in. For instance a domain end user may come to this forum and ask for an industry wide solution to problems his/her faced with a few domainers who try to sell domains. The worse thing that end user may have proofs of bad faith and may ask for an industry wide regulation/solution. Even worse, that person may label all domainers as scammers. I don't defend any parking company or any company. It's not my business. But as a business person, I always develop empathy with any person/entity who does business. That's not to defend any company or any person. It's just empathy and being inclined to reasoning of why there should be no bad faith, scam, etc. I tend to think that the reason should be technical. I tend to be optimistic. I agree with @biggie, it's not good to make accusitions without definitive proofs. Even if you have definitive proofs, industry wide solutions usually work only for in favor of the governments, not for the public. For instance, banking and finance is probably the most regulated industry. Can you tell me any benefits of all those regulations, KYC requirements, etc to average Joe? Zero. All those regulations work for the governments only, they collect more tax and spend those tax funds to their own political carrers, not for the average Joe. So please think twice when you ask for an industry wide solution for any industry.

 

[jamesau]

There is no link between domain traffic and sales.

Traffic is only a useful metric for parking revenue.

 

[biggie]

My question is if Parking Crew can provide true stats why can’t Sedo and Godaddy and although most experienced domainers know that these stats are mostly from bots, but isn’t that going to be misleading to end users or even new domainers who rely on these false stats to make a domain purchase.

Hi
the question starts with an assumption that PC stats are true, so any conclusion is not factual.
also, PC does not monitor traffic like bodis and some others, so what you think is true, may not be.

We need to have true and accurate stats throughout the Domain Industry.

Hi
i focus more on the revenue.
how one platform gauges your stats compared to another, can be seen when you hold the same names for extended periods of time.
however, fluctuations will occur due to nature/subject of any respective name

we need to demand that these Industry leaders start providing true and accurate stats from this point on.

Hi

how you gonna demand something from somebody, who is basically providing a free service, that benefits you?

offer views don't mean until somebody submits an offer or purchases at BIN price.
it may allude that the name is popular or draws curiosity, but unless it's earns some $, then you got nothing but some numbers to look at.

imo...

 

[poweredbyme]

Thanks for the detailed response,

I understand that domain companies like all other businesses want to maximize their profits,

But can we agree that traffic stats should not be inflated by anyone across the board.

And I am not asking for everyone to divulge their trade secrets, but can we agree that there is no rational reason for us to be left in the dark about what's going on with our sales landers.

Having true and accurate stats for the sales landers can help domainers immensely in adjusting their prices and sales strategies specially when visitors have to take an additional step to get to the offer or contact page.

IMO

The source of traffic data usually comes from raw server logs. Server logs contain non-human traffic. In order to better count human traffic, javascript is used like google analytics and statcounter do. But javascripts lowers accuracy for various reasons such as privacy extensions of browsers. I run dozens of websites of my own for 20 years or so. Traffic stats I see in the control panel of my ad accounts, analytics/statcounter accounts, server logs always differ a lot like 5x.

By trade secrets, I mean that each ad networks, each webstats provider hypothetically should be running their custom algo in their stats. It can explain discrepancies but not neccessarily mean purposely faking/hiding traffic data. Standardization would inevitably end up with either to reveal those custom algorithms or stop using any custom things.

Each provider may show different traffic figures and all of them may be 100% true. Technically it's possible. Particular visits may be counted by Provider A and B but not by provider C, D and E. I would focus on ad revenue or # of conversions (domain sales). Number of visitors are not reliable. That's what I try to say.

Sales landers will also differ. If you self host landing pages, you probably know that I am correct. Your server and analytics will show different figures. Even 2 different traffic tracker services (ie., analytics vs statcounter) will show you different things. If you haven't tried you can try and see.

Ad stats will also be different. On the same page, different ad networks will show different number of visitors in stats. You can try and see if I am right or wrong. You can try amazon aff ads, google ads, etc. You will see all of them will report different number of visits. Again, I would focus on what makes more $, rather than number of visits.

Those discrepancies are largely technical. I know plenty of those technical details but can not write all of them as it would turn to be a long educational article.

I understand your point. There are bad players in any industry and you have some suspicions. You are not completely wrong and being skeptic is a scientific norm. While being skeptic not a very bad thing, I would first think of possibilities. In order to think possibilities you need to research technical details. Some providers may choose to steal from customers. If I still suspect after eliminating all technical possibilities I can think of, I would dump it.

 

[biggie]

I like to know how many people have taken the additional step to get to the offer page for a certain domain name,

Hi

it seems you already know the answer to question above, from quote below

450k unique visitors in the past 12 months on my portfolio of around 1000 domains and some of my domains had consistent offer page views over 50 per month

what's important is that they showed enough interest in the domain name to get to the offer page and that can tell me a lot as far as maybe putting a Buy Now price on that domain or to adjust the Buy Now price for the domains that already have that.

Hi

you can take that "perceived interest" and do any of the choices you want to make.

it's part of a collective of metrics that a domainer might use to adjust pricing or change platforms, to improve their str or their ppc earnings.

raising or lowering prices or using 'make offer' setting is all part of what we have to do,
to keep pace with the changes in demand, trends, sales, etc.

imo...

 

[biggie]

Apparently they just make it look confusing because they somehow are benefiting from the fog

Hi

it's obvious you are making more of it than it is
making accusations that they are "hiding" data, etc.

telling other members they are just as confused because they don't know the "intent" of the viewer on their names.

The thing is why should this situation be so confusing in the first place that even veteran domainers such as yourself are put in a position that they have to guess what's going on with all this.

you're never going to know why, unless you ask the person or bot who clicked.

for a long time member to create a title that implicates parking platforms in a big lie, without posting any definitive proof, is shameful.

imo...

 

[buydomainnames]

Most of traffic is worthless ( bot , scrapper , etc) , we can migrate into cloudflare , configure firewall / WAF properly and we will know the real traffic for our domains.

 

[Future Sensors]

If the people who are in the know such as @Future Sensors start protecting the system instead of the public then the Industry will deteriorate into a mafia like organization which then is going to require the Government to intervene and regulate it.

What a bizarre, unwanted twist that you suddenly put me at the center of this.

 

[poweredbyme]

From technical perspective, you can never know the real traffic of any domain or website. Internet connections are highly chaotic.

There are tons of things that affect traffic stats, including but not limited to connection issues, custom settings and firewall/access limiting settings on client side, server side, network side, etc. Also you have to consider different traffic stats software based on different criteria and algorithms. In short, you can never know the real traffic, even if you monitor raw server logs. It's simply impossible to know the exact traffic figures which is definitely higher than the traffic data provided by various sources and software.

 

[.X.]

I have found Dan.com to be accurate with traffic stats , I don’t know their algorithm, but it’s accurate .

 

[phaethon]

Oldtimer I think you are overanalyzing, if domaining is not working for you now, it wouldn't work even if you had the most accurate stats. It's all about quality domains, not stats.
Great that you have so much free time to start this kind of pointless threads...

 

[Laguna]

I too had this with sedo. Crazy amounts of so called views but no offers. I eventually pulled all my domains away from sedo as it felt like I was being lied too

 

[lovely4ever]

I think no way any registrar or sales lander can avoid bot traffic in their statistics record .
even when using google analytics and with filter you still get lots of bot traffic ,
Thats my opinion from long time Observing the domains traffic .


.

 

[phaethon]

The other day I sold a .com with zero traffic. Some guy just hit the buy it now button. Traffic matters only if it makes money.

 

[biggie]

but please provide a disclaimer after each one of your posts indicating that you don't have any affiliations, loyalties, or personal agenda and interest that is effecting your opinion and stance in this matter because whenever the problems with stats are brought up it seems like it's always the same people who go out of their way to try to convince us that these problems don't exists even though we all as domainers (and the public at large) are being affected by them on a daily basis.

Hi

you must be nuts
every vague and unproven statement or claim you've made is based on your opinion of same industries i participate in.
so, i don't have to post any disclaimer.

you're just throwing do do against the wall, trying to convince others to sing same song.

this is basically a conspiracy theory

imo...

 

[oldtimer]

I too had this with sedo. Crazy amounts of so called views but no offers. I eventually pulled all my domains away from sedo as it felt like I was being lied too

I personally wouldn't take all my domains out of Sedo or Godaddy since they are currently the largest platforms and they produce a lot of sales.

But we need to demand that these Industry leaders start providing true and accurate stats from this point on.

The way that I look at this is that if they or anyone else choose to continue providing false or inflated stats after this warning then they are intentionally trying to deceive the consumers.

This is a very serious matter, so everyone better start taking it very seriously.

IMO

 

[Laguna]

There is no link between domain traffic and sales.

Traffic is only a useful metric for parking revenue.

Mine were parked at sedo and bodis, thousands of views but zero revenue

 

[phaethon]

One man's treasure is another man's garbage. Stats are irrelevant.

 

[Future Sensors]

Now the question is why don't they want to share that data with us by give us true and accurate stats that can help us manage our domains.

I have a solution for you.

Move to a marketplace that offers Google Analytics integration, and work with the raw data, which you can then finetune, manage, filter, and interpret to your liking.

But above all, don't get too carried away with these statistics.

 

[DotKing]

Traffic stats across domain marketplaces have nothing to do with web standards, let alone domain industry standards.
It's a simple fact that bots cannot be filtered accurately at all. Filtering bots would mean filtering many real visitors. Therefore platforms tend to show all 'visits' because of that fact. Some of them are filtering just obvious bots etc.. but it can't be 100% accurate.
If you want to have more accurate stats and insights, learn how to use Google Analytics and filters, as someone has mentioned that already.

 

[lovely4ever]

So how does Parking Crew filter all those bots and junk traffic, because their traffic stats seem to be very accurate and it's also in real time so you can see the chsnges in traffic as they occur.

IMO

dont rely on it %100 , Even though it can include some bots traffic what you see on parking crew .

Simply if the visitor stay longer than 1 minute in avg. session duration you can assume it is real traffic , but still no guarantee .

.

 

[oldtimer]

how you gonna demand something from somebody, who is basically providing a free service, that benefits you?

There is some grounds for demanding as such,

This whole problem started when Registrars and Registries started getting in direct competition with the Registrants (their own customers) for domain names.

I like to know how many people have taken the additional step to get to the offer page for a certain domain name, the fact that they didn't make an offer is not important here, what's important is that they showed enough interest in the domain name to get to the offer page and that can tell me a lot as far as maybe putting a Buy Now price on that domain or to adjust the Buy Now price for the domains that already have that.

IMO

 

[biggie]

Hi Biggie,

Stop protecting a flawed system and try to make some constructive suggestions as to what could be done to fix these problems Industry wide.

It's not just parking, it's sales lander statistics and also domain and website traffic in general that needs to be made available in an accurate and standardized way.

Now let me ask you this, as a longtime member yourself what do you have against bringing some order and uniformity to the domain Industry and why do you want to discourage us to even discuss these problems.

You should already know that I am not one who gives in to the status quo of doing things so easily and neither should you.

IMO

Hi
i'm only trying to protect the integrity of the forum and assist in clarifying or contradicting statements made which could mislead others.
you start a thread title with a negative accusation and never provide any proof.

as a user of these platforms for almost 2 decades, i don't agree with your argument.
you can continue to discuss whatever you want, but i won't encourage those who mislead, misrepresent or just plain make-up shit, without proving proof or some type of evidence.

everybody that knows me, knows i don't pander to nobody and will question anything i see as questionable.
and this is one of those questionables.

but can we agree that there is no rational reason for us to be left in the dark about what's going on with our sales landers.

Hi
no, we can't
you can't project your confusions on others and make it stick, as an industry wide problem
especially when we don't know what domains you own, how many names you sold, how many offers you have received, which get visitors and which don't or where your visitors, if any, come from, etc., etc.?

Having true and accurate stats for the sales landers can help domainers immensely in adjusting their prices and sales strategies specially when visitors have to take an additional step to get to the offer or contact page

Hi
if you have a domain that doesn't get many visitors, do you lower price to entice buyers?

the answer is...
> too many factors to say, without knowing the actual name, how many other offers, does it earn any revenue, etc., etc.

so, point to that is, visitors alone has little to do with pricing, as it depends on many other factors.

if you can't prove that your stats are inaccurate, then why make the accusation?

on other hand, if you were getting offers, some sales, and earning some ppc $ too, then what?

imo...

 

[oldtimer]

so, i don't have to post any disclaimer.

That kind of says it all,

I was hoping that you as a long time member here could see above your personal interest and help us look after the registrants' and consumer's interests at large.

With all your knowledge and experience I hope that someday soon you change your mind and become a Force For Good in the domain Industry.

IMO