Part 1 - How to Price Your Domains for any Market

As I’ve stated in a previous article, pricing domains can be a difficult task. Many domain owners firmly believe that the price completely depends upon the buyer. The problem with this position is that it runs contrary to the fact that priced domains are more likely to sell. In this article, I’m going to attempt to put some mathematics behind pricing domains in ANY market vertical.

I made my first attempt at pricing domains in an article last year. At the end of the article I suggest that a lot more thinking needed to go into the model…..so here goes!

I’m a firm believer in economic theory and the rules of supply and demand. High prices are the result of a combination of high demand and low supply while low prices are a function of both large amount of supply and low demand. You can see the rules of supply and demand all over the business world; from oil and iron ore right through to dog food.

Supply and demand lead me to attempt to build a demand curve for a set of keywords in a market vertical. I entered mortgage, loans and finance into Google’s keyword tool and out popped 703 keywords with both the estimated volume of traffic, recommended price point and demand (ie. competition) for that keyword.

After a little bit of Excel magic I was able to produce the below demand chart for the financial category. I will be the first to indicate that you can actually get a more accurate curve with greater numbers of data points but the essence of the demand curve will remain intact. The interesting thing is you can also build the same sort of curve for any group of keywords.

So what are we looking at? This is a pretty good picture of a marketers view of the keyword landscape for their particular market. Remember, this does not provide a picture of what they are spending but how much they value a particular keyword.

The only reason marketers will consistently pay more for certain keywords is because the traffic from that keyword provides a return on their investment. This is the why each keyword has a different price point. This means the demand curve is a mirror of the conversion rate for each keyword.

We do know that the average keyword domain sells for around $AU2000 ($US1,500). It could be then said that keywords around the “weighted mean” (ie. the point at which the areas to the left and right of the chart are equal) of $21 will attract the $2K price tag. Domains down the curve will sell for less than $2K and those above this point will sell for more than $2K.

For example, “second mortgage rates” has a bid price of $12.60 which slides it about 25% down the curve from the weighted mean which would suggest this domain is worth around $1,500. On the other hand “second mortgage loans” (a more targeted keyword) is selling for $21.33 and places it right about the mean and a price tag of $2,000. “Second mortgage” is a shorter keyword and has a price tag of $22.86 which pushes up the demand curve by 5% which suggests the domain is worth around $2200.

These prices are guesstimate and I will attempt to do a more accurate pricing later in the article. What’s interesting is keywords such as “refinance second mortgage” is 45% higher on the demand curve than the mean and are deemed more valuable than the shorter keyword versions. So why is this the case?

Remember the demand curve will only keep in place if the underpinning metrics of a sale are met. It’s not just about traffic volume or “brandability”. Ultimately, it’s all about sales! This suggests that people that click on the keyword “refinance second mortgage” are more likely to purchase a second mortgage compared to individuals that click on “second mortgage”.  In fact, we can calculate the number as being nearly 40% more often.

This flies-in-the-face of the assumption that a short domain is a good domain. Sometimes shorter keyword domains provide more traffic but they bring a lot of tire kickers who don’t purchase products or services. The simple act of typing in more letters can be one of the more interesting qualifiers of whether a consumer will purchase or not.

For instance, everyone would assume that “best loans” is a great domain….and yet, the marketers don’t like that keyword and push it down the demand curve. What they love is “home refinance” and are prepared to pay top dollar for traffic from that keyword.

Here’s the problem with this analysis. The amount of $2,000 for the weighted mean is an assumption for this market vertical. I believe that every market vertical will have an average value that domains are sold for…..the majority of this type of information is held by the incumbent marketplaces.

What I’m saying is that for the finance sector rather than $2,000 it could actually be $10,000 or even less for the weighted mean. In my next article I’ll continue to dig and pull out more on the mid-point number.