Domain marketplace shares data about what’s selling and how.
Domain name marketplace and branding site Squadhelp has published its 2021 in Review, disclosing valuable data about what type of domains are selling and how.
The company reports that premium listings grew 71% year over year to 123,000. The site accepts about 10-12% of submissions. As the number of listings increases, Squadhelp says that overall sell-through rates decline a bit, but the company is making up for this with more marketing spend.
This year, the company spent over $2 million on digital marketing to bring 23.5 million unique visitors to the platform. Marketing spend was up 85% on the year. Squadhelp reports that this drove marketplace revenue growth of 123%, compared to the 71% listings growth. The company is putting all of its profits back into more marketing.
One of Squadhelp’s unique features is that it pays for retargeting ads to domains. If someone visits your domain, they might see ads for that domain as they travel around the web afterward.
A big question I have about naming platforms like Squadhelp is if buyers would have purchased your domain anyway and just typed the domain into their browser to land on your market-hosted ‘for sale’ page. At Squadhelp, more than 85% of landing page visits are via a discovery path, not directly going to the landing page. The report states, “This means that a substantial % of incremental exposure is mainly coming from buyers who do not have a specific name in mind before coming to our platform.”
Squadhelp is a data-driven company, and its report has some great data about the characteristics of domains that sell. Many domain investors look at the number of extensions a domain is registered in as a popularity metric. Squadhelp’s data shows this is a good metric. This chart shows the sell-through rate of domains on Squadhelp by the number of extensions the domain is taken in:
This year, Squadhelp added a feature that alerts you when a domain you’ve listed is registered in a new extension. I’m not aware of any other marketplace that does this.
The report also has data about keywords that are selling the best and top searches on the platform. Yes, meta and nft are on the list. But the other keywords are rather interesting.
