The post is from 2002 and much has changed but what “Lisa” says seems very reasonable so I will republish it for anyone interested in trying to figure out what their domains may be worth.

I have outlined 13 metrics to judge a domain name in a self-appraisal.

1) Marketability
2) Phone Test
3) Name Length
4) Brand Recognition
5) Development Value
6) Dot Value
7) Site Traffic natural
Site Traffic by Search Engines
9) Industry Strength and Positioning
10) Search Engine Popularity
11) Grammatical / Linguistic value
12) Revenue Generating
13) Comparable sales value

———–

1) Marketability
How many parts make up the name?

A part is classified as a word, a hyphen, or a number.
Example.com has only 1 part, the word “example”.
JoeTheFisherman.com has 3 parts, the parts “Joe”, “The”, and “Fisherman”.
Joe-Fisherman.com has 3 parts, the parts “Joe”, “hyphen”, and “Fisherman”.
1Fisherman.com has 2 parts, the parts “1”, and “Fisherman”.
eFisherman.com has 2 parts, the parts “E”, and “Fisherman”.

1 part award 100 points
2 parts award 10 points
3 parts award 2 points
4 parts award 1 point
5 parts or more award 0 points

2) Phone Test
Try giving out the Domain Name on the phone. How does the domain name sound on the phone.

Does the domain use a hyphen or a number?
Do I spell out a number inside the name ex: (“one”)?
Does the domain use a miss-spelling at all?

If the answer to these questions is all “no” then multiple current score by 5.
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes” then divide current score by 2.

3) Name Length (doesn’t include the length of “www.” or “.” or the ending extension)

Find the highest rule that applies.

If 1 part and the name is less then or equal to 8 characters, then multiple current score by 6.
If 1 part and the name is less then or equal to 15 characters, then multiple current score by 3.
If 1 part and the name is less then or equal to 19 characters, then multiple current score by 2.

If 2 parts and the name is less then or equal to 10 characters, then multiple current score by 4.
If 2 parts and the name is less then or equal to 16 characters, then multiple current score by 3.
If 2 parts and the name is less then or equal to 19 characters, then multiple current score by 2.

If 3 parts and the name is less then or equal to 12 characters, then multiple current score by 2.

4) Brand Recognition
Do people know what the site does even before they even go there?
Either through the meaning of the name or by advertising.
An example of advertising is everyone knows Microsoft.com or ATT.com.
Normal people will need to use the domain meaning to score on this point.

If name has Brand Recognition then multiple current score by 3.

5) Development Value
How much work as been put into Developing the site?
Just a Splash page then multiple current score by 2.
Something more then a Splash page then multiple current score by 3.
Has the domain ever hosted a website that received more then 1000 visitors a day then multiple current score by 25.

6) Dot Value
If .COM extension multiple current score by 3.
If country extension multiple current score by 2.
If country extension is now generic no bonus (example .CC, .TV, .WS)

7) Site Traffic Natural
10-39 natural type-ins multiple current score by 4.
40-100 natural type-ins multiple current score by 8.
100+ natural type-ins multiple current score by 25.
Natural type-ins means (Unique IPs without referrers)

Site Traffic by Search Engines
10-39 Unique IPs multiple current score by 2.
40-500 Unique IPs multiple current score by 3.
500+ Unique IPs multiple current score by 4.

9) Industry Strength and Positioning
Does the domain have a calling? If the domain has a targeted industry how crowded is that industry? Does the domain accurately and generically describe what it was registered to do. Here is an example, For a travel agent, FlyCheap.com is a score 3. For a travel agent TravelCheap.com is a score 7.

Describes generically the industry then multiple current score by 7.
Describes specifically something in the industry then multiple current score by 3.

10) Search Engine Popularity
How do the terms in the domain name rank in Search Engines?

“Great”, then multiple current score by 7.
“Good”, then multiple current score by 2.
“All Right”, then no bonus.

11) Grammatical / Linguistic value
Does it sounds correct? Does it read like a human normally speaks. For example: ShoppestMall.com, this sounds wierd. But ShoppingMall.com sounds correct. The plural form verses the singular form makes a huge difference.

If the name sounds correct, then multiple current score by 2.

12) Revenue Generating

Multiple yearly income of the domain by 2.5, add this dollar value to your final price.

13) Comparable sales value

What other domains have sold at that price. Is your name the same score?
Market analysis on your domain price is very important. Being able to justify your price against other domains selling price is key. Don’t do marketing analysis off of list price. Only selling price will work. To find prices of domains that have sold use Afternic or other domain auction sites.

The highest score possible is something huge like 6,615,000,000
Score doesn’t correlate to actual price very well, You need to use percentiles to figure out what the price is.

Total score:
Lowest = $15 (40 percentile)
Low score = $25-$40 (30 percentile)
Mid score = $100-$300 (25 percentile)
High score = $500-$1000 (3 percentile)
Extreme score = $1000+ (2 percentile)

the post can be found here

I have seen too many people place a lot of decision weight into a sites Alexa rank, sometimes being very disappointed, other times pleasantly surprised. I wanted to see how good the Alexa guesstimate really was.

Some people see it as the prime tool for site valuation while others dismiss it as fluff. I had to know for myself. Through my own sites and those of my clients I have a good deal of data for many different sites and I decided to track 4 sites and see how the Alexa data compared to the real metrics.

From what I know, Alexa uses ISP data as well as some user data to rate a sites traffic. I would imagine the data they collect serves as a sample group. The problem with sample groups is that unless the group is a true sample of the worlds internet user base, the results could be heavily skewed.

Now I am not sure if they base stats on samples, but, It would be kinda difficult to get data from every single user, so I assume its based on some type of sampling.

Alexa does state they use ISP data, I do not know which ISP’s, but there can be many issues with using an ISP as a sample of any population of internet users. For example, if the ISP data used is from a dial-up provider, you can expect that media based sites would suffer and your sample group would be occasional internet surfers, as opposed to daily die hards. If it was a dedicated line provider, it would be heavily business oriented. Sounds logical… right? anyway, I had to see how the 4 sites I picked did.

I used 2 sites that were well established, and 2 fairly new. The reason I chose these was because 1 new one and 1 old made a pair that received close to the same amount of real traffic (site 1 & 3, 2 & 4) and I wanted to see how accurate the rankings were.

The first established site had a traffic base between 1k and 2k daily, all visitors going to the homepage with 50% of the traffic coming from PPC.

The other well established site was an old single word domain that goes back to 1998, most traffic is organic SE and it consistently receives 800 to 1.3k daily.

The third site, was a newer blog that would receive 1k to 3k visitors to many different pages of which 1/3 to 1/2 would be the home page.

The last site was an informational site that was at about 600 daily with a growth that would put it in the 1k to 2k range within a few months.

At the beginning of the test period I logged the Alexa rank of all 4 sites.

I tracked this over 3 months because Alexa uses a 3 month average and I used these sites because they had close to the same page views and traffic

Here is how it looked when I started and I am rounding off the numbers

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 3 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Well, you can look at those numbers and make your own judgments on accuracy. The first thing that really amazed me is that site 1 and 2 are both established sites with single word domain names in the same type of traffic field (the same surfers would most likely visit both) Site 2 has always received less traffic than site 1 but 1/2 of site 1 traffic is ppc and site 2 Alexa score is incredibly better than site 1 when both sites are in the same niche and both are over 5 years old.

At this point I have 2 sites with little growth and that have not shown growth in years, also 2 sites that are growing. I did a few things to the first 2 sites to see how it tracked also site 3 had a roller coaster of a 3rd month.

Since its a bit long, I will save it for another post in a few days.

Understanding the meaning of your website metrics is not always easy. I am a marketing and site traffic consultant. Last week, a very excited client asked my opinion of a website he was buying purely for its traffic. O.K., I kinda cringed when he told me and crossed my fingers hoping the numbers were as good as he believed them to be. Unfortunately, buying sites as a traffic source for another site does not always give the buyers their expected end results (tons of free, non ppc, traffic that they can convert as well as the ppc traffic they now receive).

So he goes on to tell me about the site. He loves the design, and has surfed the site himself for fun on several occasions. The content and subject is somewhat related to his field of business but the sites business model is based on advertising revenue and not product sales. He was not looking to change the business model even though the owner told him it was not doing well. He was looking to add that sites traffic to his current ppc traffic to boost his primary site sales. The seller showed him the logs and the site was getting 5k+ visits daily, thats 5 times what he gets from his ppc campaigns.

On his product site he averaged about 1k visits daily from ppc that convert at a fair rate of 11%. He was very excited at the opportunity of adding a good amount of that sites traffic to his own to grow his site and become less dependent on ppc.

He figured if he could get just a few % of those 5k to convert everything would be very rosey. In the excitement over free traffic, he missed some key issues.

Getting them to the “product” site from the “traffic” site in order to even try to convert them and the fact that the owner already told him the ad revenue was minimal (meaning those surfers aren’t to quick to check out the sites ads). Personally, I don’t think those issues even crossed his mind, he was just seeing this purely as traffic that he could somehow direct over to the shop.

OK, lets examine this

5k visitors? lets check em out. I pull up his logs and I run through it with him

The majority of those site visitors 67% are google referrals, most people would think thats great, but its not always as good as it sounds. Looking further into the google referrals I see that 2/3 are actually google image. So now, the REAL referrals are 1/3 of 67% of 5k

Or, 3350 are google image and 1105 are keyword search. The site is not completely related to his product, but it does fall into the same general arena. To put this in perspective, he is selling oranges, the site is about funny looking lemons. So they are both sites about citrus fruit, though different and his is a store while the site for sale is entertainment.

I explain the difference between google image search and google search, I was surprised he really never looked into it. Basically, he was only looking at the keyword counts without looking to see what kind of a search it was. Google image only loads the image into a remote frame, the visitors never really see your site unless they click on the url to see it while google search links to your page directly.

OK, he isn’t as happy now, he just lost 3k daily from his figures. But my news for him just gets worse here. Looking at the organic search words I see that none even come close to being related to buying or shopping for “fruit”, they just wanted to be entertained by cool images or stories of “fruit”. These people were obviously fans of “fruit” but how would that convert into selling them?

So now, knowing what the numbers mean a bit better, he says, ” It’s still 1k free customers and if 1% convert that would be OK”.

Not really, the site in question is a blog, not a store, so 1% conversion may be unlikely. Think about it…

You use ppc ads to get traffic, the ads say “buy fruit”, shop for fruit”, “even “cheap fruit”. When a customer clicks the link they are in fact, shopping and looking to buy. So every person coming to the site is looking to buy something. Out of every 100 people you sell 11 of them.

The site in question has a traffic stream of people who ARE NOT looking to buy anything and they are on a site not selling anything. He has to get them to his product site first with links, ads and reviews. The site visitors need to do more than the visitors he is used to on his site, they need to first click the ad, then go to his site and get sold. That means he needs another % in there for ad click trough.

So we get 1% (if lucky) will click his ads, then go to his site, since these people were not originally looking to buy, the conversion on them would be much lower, lets say 4%. So how many people are we talking about now? Well, less than 1 per day!

My advice to him was, add an extra few bucks to your ppc account and not have to worry about running another site!

After that rundown, I started telling him what the costs involved in updating and maintaining a blog were… he walked away in mid sentence.