The title is about domains! In my last post I got a question how much money I make from the domains that make little traffic. The answer is that it really depends. First take a look at this screenshot, put your attention to the CTR:

It’s a few of my parked domains. Take a note of the 2nd and 3rd domain. They perform very well. (Note that the 3rd one had just been parked for 10 days when I took this screen.) These two domains are product trademarks.

Then look at the one which had 3,788 visitors. It performs really, really bad. It’s a typo of a community.

So what decides how well a parked domain will perform?

If the domain is a general keyword/phrase. It will usually perform very well. The user has no exact expectations on what kind of website she will find. If there is a list of relevant links she will happily click them. These domains will often benefit from being developed too.

Typos of general keywords probably perform the same as above. I don’t own any but the user expectations are exactly the same.

Product trademarks are similar to the above, but there are differences. The user may expect an official product website, which will make it perform worse. Also the amount of advertisers may be (very) limited, or none for the actual trademark itself (this is the case when I got a ccTLD of a trademark of a US product).

Typos of well known sites can’t be grouped as one type of performer as they can perform very different. Take a look at the screenshot again. The first and last are both typos of big sites.

The first domain has visitors looking for chat and dating, and a lot of them the adult sort of that. This makes adult ads work very well. I would guess that most of them are also middle age and not as web savvy as younger people, this means higher ctr.

The last domain has visitors looking for news, at a very specific site, they have visited this site for years and know exactly what to expect, when they see that they came to the wrong site they just immediately re-types the domain. This website doesn’t advertise on ppc, if it was and had an ad for itself on the parked page some visitors would click it as it would be faster than typing the domain again, I do own a few domains like this, not on this screenshot though.

Domain number 4,6 and 7 perform very bad for pretty much the same reasons as the domain above.

How well a domain can peform depends on a few other things too. For example how web savvy the visitors are, which itself depends on e.g. niche, age, and even country. Do YOU ever click on ads when you happen to mistype a domain and land on a parked domain? I don’t.

Of course you can tweak your domains trying different keywords, layouts and parking services, developing them. But there is a limit for each domain how well it can peform.