How much traffic do you lose to Direct Navigation? at Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

How much traffic do you lose to Direct Navigation?

Published on March 5, 2007 in Domain Names.

Many companies are named with related locations/family-names terms in them, such as "Yorkshire Consulting" or "Jones Travel". Millions of consumers, at times, assume the web addresses to find these type of companies are the main part of the company name, in these cases Yorkshire.com or Jones.com .
Since there are many businesses with these names only one can enjoy the fruits, the rest have to look for alternative domains. Only one can have Jones.com while others may have JonesTravel.com, JonesTours.com, JonesHotels.com etc.
Many such domains are not yet full blown sites. Some are inactive, some are parked, and other may still be relatively small businesses. What it means is there’s a golden opportunity for business owners to try and get a hold of their related domains before it is too late. I’m not talking here about exact brand names (cybersquatting) but I’m talking about the main part of their brand name which they may not have exclusive rights to.
As time passes by the value of these domains will go up, many will get developed, or acquired by others.
Now you say to yourself "What do I care? I already have a web address?" right? Wrong. You should care because as stated in the first paragraph of this post, the consumer that you have ALREADY spent money to acquire is now having a hard time finding you and may go elsewhere.
Millions of people typing in these types of domains every single day trying to find a destination which they know of, but cannot figure out the web address. Are you one of those businesses? And if you are, do you have any idea how much you are losing? My guess is.. allot!

2 Responses to “How much traffic do you lose to Direct Navigation?”

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1 Frank
Mar 5th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

Well said.. the time to acquire high quality names cheaply is always today. I have never made a name purchase yet I have regretted paying too much for.. quite the contrary.. if anything I wish i’d paid more to get some of those I missed.
2 Josh
May 14th, 2009 at 12:53 am

This is very debatable. I would assume the vast majority of people if they do try to direct navigate and don’t get to the site they wanted at first, will just search for it on google and end up at the site anyway. Then you could assume that you have “the extremely rare unable to use google or any search engine for that matter, type” that will hear about your product at the coffee shop and go directly home and try and direct navigate to it, then when they don’t get to the site, they give up. But chances are because they really want that product their friend was telling them about they write down the exact address when they see their friend at the coffee shop the next day.

The chance that you will miss someone that really wants your product is rare and has a low probability of occurring. Will it eventually happen?…of course. Is it best to get your exactname.com? Technically Yes. Is it extremely necessary or will you suffer great losses from not getting that exact domain? Probably Not.