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In the last article I discussed some of the problems that EPC presents for parking companies that want to display stats on a more or less immediate basis for their customers. I had a great comment suggesting that I get my facts straight about what data Google and Yahoo actually provide. By the way, I love getting comments both positive and negative as I believe that it promotes discussion in the domain community. So don’t hold back if you think I’m completely off base.....I’ve got to learn to you know :-)
 I indicated in my very contrived example that Google and Yahoo provide revenue data on a domain by domain basis. I believe that this is the case but it really depends upon what feed the parking company is receiving. In some instances they only get a single revenue number for all of the traffic and they then have to separate and allocate this number across all the domains that generated the traffic.
This means that the parking companies that receive a single revenue number need to estimate the value of each keyword being applied to particular domains. These EPC rates may have nothing to do with what advertisers are actually paying for the keywords. It’s an estimation that allows the parking company to make a margin (which they need to do) and pass the appropriate level of revenue share to the domain owner. What a headache!
Here’s another challenge. Until recently many Google fed parking companies were forced to aggregate their traffic onto a limited number of tags. This effectively meant that your traffic was mixed with other traffic. So if you have domains with high quality traffic their EPC rates could have been smart priced down due to the impact of another person’s domains that were of dubious quality. All of this is created a right royal mess for parking companies to sort out. I now believe that Google has provided the parking companies with enough tags so that each of their customers are effectively on their own individual feed.
Let’s think about the impact of that change at Google from a domain owner’s perspective. This means that if you have poorly converting traffic for the advertiser then you will no longer be supported by higher paying traffic and your traffic will be smart priced downwards. In the past you were able to keep the value of your traffic higher due to being supported by other domainers. This is the case no longer.
The second issue is that Google now has information on every parking company customer. What domains they have, the quality of the traffic and the volume of the traffic. I’m sure that they’ve squared this off in their own Google contracts but the parking companies have now effectively opened their client list up to Google.
Lastly, this level of transparency that Google now has helps them identify not only bad traffic but bad domain owners. If you are pumping fraudulent traffic into the network then I believe your days are numbered.
As we can see simply looking at EPC at face value is probably a little too simplistic a point of view. EPC is ultimately what all traffic domainers hang their hat on and it is a fundamental part of the risk/reward equation that we are trying to understand. In the next article I’ll continue to break out some other aspects of EPC that may be unknown to many domain owners.
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