May 07
Domain name decisions are complicated
Posted by
Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:
The ad on the left has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The ad on the right has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).
200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.
Changing the address on a Google advert is easy enough, but what about when we print vouchers, business cards and vehicle signage? Perhaps the same rules don't apply - if you see YuppieChef.com on a vehicle driving down Long Street in Cape Town, would you presume that the site has South African delivery?
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That is really interesting. I suppose, if your reader base is mostly South Africa, people like to stay local, whether it is because it feels more reachable, or whether it has to do with bandwidth reasons, that is hard to tell.
I just find those stats really interesting - thank you for your article!
Hi Andrew, very interesting indeed. To me it makes no difference but to local consumers it probably does. I am really just guessing when I say that South Africans will choose localised services first before going international.
Were your ads shown on google.com or google.co.za?
What are the keywords you used - are they broad term keywords or very specific targeted for local users ?
Hi Melt
The ads are only shown to South African visitors to Google’s site (or through Adsense on other sites, but still only to SA visitors). Google lets you target people based on their IP address.
You can’t specify google.com or google.co.za when advertising, but it doesn’t really matter to advertise on google.com if you know the ads will only show to South Africans.
The ads mentioned here are for fairly broad keywords like “cooking tools”. We also have some more targetted keywords and ads for specific products, like “global knives”. I will be doing similar experiments with the URL on these ads.
Have you considered .za.com ? Being a company based in South Africa with both local and possible international clients, I think it compliments your website.