I was just wondering if there was any rule of thumb in the domaining world in regards to a ratio of exact match searches in Google to the number of times someone will type the domain in?

Basically I'm trying to work out if it is worth the time parking domains that only get a few hundred exact match searches a month.

Been mixed views on aussie type in traffic on here in the past - personally I don't get a lot even with my premium names. Repeat visitors yes, but I doubt many organic first time type ins.

As always though, I would think that any basic site would do better than a parked page.

one word generics always get good type ins, are the most brandable and thus most expensive. I have a mix of 1 and 2 word generics I also do ok with the two word names as type ins.

They only type in the .com.au and never the .net.au I have found from my stats of what I have. Thus I dont even bother with .net's anymore as investments. I pay more for better .com.au's and find it more fruitful financially

I remember seeing stats a while ago saying that around 10% of internet users type in exact match domains over 90% of people using search engines, yet this was for very premium one word .com domains. Do not know how accurate that is??

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Just taking one example because I have the data at hand:

1600 exact searches a month, 30 uniques in one year. Works out to 640:1

That is along way from being accurate.

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Yes I was referring to premium .com domains...

Loans.com
Banking.com
CreditCards.com
Shopping.com
news.com

Not something which has 1600 exact searches a month in the AU market...

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The problem with citing names like the above is that most of the time they will have been developed.

For the typical one word .com it is still nothing like 10% in my view, might get a figure like that on the odd domain, especially names with some element of spillover traffic if there is large sites on similar domains, eg if the name was matching.com versus match.com, planet.com versus theplanet.com etc.

Also the % will be higher for terms that are more brands rather than huge search terms eg stuff like find.com, egg.com or win.com, where the the term functions better as a domain that it does as a search term.

I think a more normal figure is 2%-3% for one word .com type names, this is just from what I have seen. Even then I don't think it is an "instead of" using a search engine, I think a smaller % of people do it in addition to using a search engine.

When it comes to figures like this a lot of what gets claimed in this industry is for the purpose of promotion rather than providing accurate information. People will read some stats about direct navigation and start leaving out a few words here and there and start taking things out of context until an argument is made that was never part of the actual report. So if someone is claiming 10% of people type in random domains instead of using a search engine it doesn't surprise me much.

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Thanks everyone for their feedback.

The problem is though can you put Google AdSense on a one page site, because if you have a number of domains and don't have time to develop them into something more substantial?

At least this would also give Google something to index and potentially rank.

Wow... well those aren't exactly encouraging. Makes me think the money really is in the development.

Cracks me up, everyone has an hour or two a day to talk shit on here

If you invest in a domain, develop it. Even a simple one-click install of wordpress with the default theme will get indexed. Outsource some article/content writing for $2-$5 per 500 words and get some initial content on there while you are developing 'something more substantial'.

You only need to add a privacy page and you're good for Adsense - just don't make it a banner farm.

I think the market in Australia is too small to really do well from parking, it would need a portfolio of mega names to really make a go of it. Around 6-8 years ago I looked at .com.au a lot in terms of parking and the most popular search terms I could find, (the types of names that would get good traffic flow in .com) never really had much traffic. There was the very occasional winner but it wasn't worth the time spent on it. I agree with the above, the only way in my view to make money from it is development and resale.

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