DomainMart: Direct Navigation – Marketing Implications for Domain Names, Websites

DomainMart examines the affect of direct navigation on revenue from website visits. It introduces a new online marketing weapon, direct navigation marketing, which is powerful when website content matches visitor intent.

Berkeley, CA (PRWEB) October 9, 2006 – DomainMart, a leading provider of quantitative and analytical e-commerce services, released today a paper on the marketing implications of direct navigation.

The paper describes direct navigation as the vehicle, not the cause, of potentially higher revenue per website visitor. Moreover, it points out that high sales-conversion rates from direct navigation, a measure of comparative revenue, are the result of the convergence of visitor intent with site content.

“The causes of high revenue are website content and a higher profit from direct navigation marketing,” says Alex Tajirian, DomainMart CEO.

Type-ins, the main source of direct navigation, are either driven by brand name recognition or by a user assuming that there exists an authoritative site for a very large set of keywords and typing its address in the browser as keyword.com (or dot-country-code (ccTLD)).

According to the paper, the continued use of type-ins depends on five factors: (1) effective indirect and direct navigation marketing; (2) user’s experience with direct navigation meeting intent; (3) increase in Internet use; (4) users’ experience with search engine methods to achieve intent; and (5) marketing efforts by competitor search methodologies, such as search engines, to promote alternatives to direct navigation. Companies have direct influence on factors (1) and (2).

Hence, a website’s success with direct navigation has two integrated elements: marketing and website component. Marketing has three components: explicit, implicit, and TLD free riding (due to TLD barding, such as “.com”).

The paper defines explicit direct navigation marketing when the visited site explicitly rewards visitors. On the other hand, the implicit marketing component of direct navigation is driven by:

(a)   Being a byproduct of a company’s general marketing and branding efforts, these can manifest in bookmarks and type-ins. Thus, this marketing component is not free. Hence, when computing the benefits of direct navigation, such costs must be incorporated into the analysis.

(b)    In addition to the TLD free riding, noted above, the company also is free-riding any positive buzz on direct navigation in the online, print media, and word of mouth.

“When there are higher net returns from direct navigation, the company should explicitly promote and encourage such visitor behavior,” adds Tajirian, while warning that “ignoring visitor intent can be detrimental to direct navigation.”

About DomainMart
DomainMart is an industry leader in providing e-commerce products and consulting services, including appraisal, escrow, private investment management funds, protection, valuation, and parking traffic monetization management since 1996.

For more information, please visit http://www.domainmart.com/news/Direct_Navigation-Marketing_Implications.htm or contact:

Tom Saitori, Marketing Specialist
DomainMart
Tel: +1 (415) 905-4234

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