Selling Domains Via AdWords

There is an interesting thread over at Dnforum.com right now where a bunch of guys have been having good luck selling domains through an AdWords campaign. The theory is that you’ll reach more potential buyers by targeting the keywords that comprise the domain name (with and without extension) and you won’t spend a fortune because there really aren’t that many people who type domain names right into google. Of the people who do type domains right into the Google search field, how many are going to type in the domain you’re trying to sell?

Most of the people giving this a try are going through AfterNIC to sell their domains, and have the ad’s destination URL set to their landing page there. There are some people using Sedo, though I haven’t seen many reports of success yet. I seem to be the lone loon trying to sell the domains on my own (which is fine… I figured someone should be different just to make the discussion interesting).

The CTR on my ads is 20-ish%, but I’m not getting a tremendous number of impressions per day either. I have gotten a few clicks. No inquiries or purchases yet. Part of that might have something to do with the prices I’m asking for the domains, but they’re worth enough to me to sit on for a few years longer if I don’t get the price I want.

This definitely seems to be a good way to reach a broader audience and particularly end-users who aren’t as tight with the purse strings as domainers. The only problem with using AdWords for marketing your available domains seem to be the cost associated with marketing high value, single dictionary word domains because the number of impressions and the cost per click can make it too expensive to continue the campaign for very long.