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Here’s what Paul Nix announced today at NamesCon.
GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) President Paul Nix gave the opening keynote at NamesCon today.
Nicks has made an announcement that registrants are sure to love: in the future, you’ll be able to see domain search data for your domains. This will let domain owners know how many times someone has searched for an exact match to their domains.
This data would be a huge added value. Imagine how many times someone has searched each of your domains on GoDaddy and other registrars in the Afternic network, which has 41 million combined searches per month. 90% of all GoDaddy Aftermarket sales come from exact match searches.
This data will help you understand the demand for your domains and understand which domains to renew.
Currently, GoDaddy customers can see how many Whois queries are being made for their domains. This data has always been vulnerable to bot traffic, and now that contact information is hidden in Whois, few people look in Whois.
Domain investors can also look forward to an improved app that will allow them to manage their domains on the go. The Domain Investor Application is currently only used for Domain Auctions.
In other product news, Nix revealed that GoDaddy plans to make access to the Domain Academy included in the Domain Discount Club.
Nix also gave examples of how the company is testing landing page designs. Based on feedback from the Dan.com team, which GoDaddy acquired this year, the company has made changes to the colors of the Buy Now landing page. In testing, this resulted in a whopping 43.5% increase in people clicking the “Buy Now” button on domains.
Not all tests work the way you expect. Testing a less cluttered version of the GoDaddy landing page with buy requests resulted in a 23% decrease in conversions. (Note that GoDaddy runs these tests on its own domains, not on customer domains.)
GoDaddy is also testing a price change that I proposed in March: changing the final price of domains from $999 to $111. For example, instead of a domain price of $1999, it will cost $2111. Nix said the data is not yet statistically significant, but early testing shows a 10 percent increase in sales revenue as a result of the change. This is partly due to the price increase, but the number of conversions is also increasing.
In terms of domain funding, Nix said the addition of Klarna’s “Buy Now, Pay Later” service to aftermarket domains did not lead to increased sales. The company is working on implementing the long-term payment plans that Dan offers.
Another statistic worth sharing is that 1.5 million expired domains go through GoDaddy’s auctions every month.