WHD.usa 2017: Verisign's Scott Schnell on How Domain Names can Power your Hosting Sales

I'm going to talk about the other end of the spectrum: getting customers in the first place. Because in the hosting industry, one of the chief challenges that everybody has is standing out. A lot of the ways that you stand out, in fact a lot of the ways that Verisign stands out, are through operational excellence. But operational excellence is hard to sell when everyone presumes you've got it. They presume everybody brings that to the table, and it's only after they look that they find out who actually does a great job, who's up all the time, who has great performance, who delivers on their promises, and who doesn't.

So I want to talk about how do you attract customers in the first place. What is it that causes a customer to click the mouse and ultimately buy something? And I'm going to talk a little bit about how domain names play a critical role in getting a customer to make that click. We're going to talk about three topics.

One, we're going to talk about domain names at the very top of the funnel, where you're first intercepting your customers, where you're first talking to prospects and educating them about why your style of hosting, your services, are the right ones to fit their business model. Secondly, we're going to talk about how domain names fit and what kinds of domain names you want to help your customers buy. Now, in the past, many hosting providers were pretty passive about domain names. They figured the end user would show up already owning one, and in many cases that's true. But more and more, as we get deeper into a maturity phase in the US market in particular, you've got to be prepared to help the customer find domain names, one or more, that serve their business needs.

And then finally, we're going to talk about how to operationalize that, how to actually put it into practice and to get domain names. Now, there are three primary reasons why domain names are critical for your marketing. First of all, domain names perform extremely well in SEM in terms of hosting-like keywords. That seems kind of odd, and we're going to talk about that. Secondly, they're great advertising buys. People get domain names, they get the brand that they're going to apply to their business, and they want to try and take advantage of that when they're buying hosting. And then lastly, branding is an extremely popular and important topic for most businesses thinking about putting themselves on the Internet. And there are plenty of late adopters out there, and domain names play a critical role in that.

So data is where all of us want to start, and fortunately, Google provides a lot of data on search. What you see before you, it's very difficult to read, are the search terms that end-users use when they're trying to find hosting and domain names. And not surprisingly, you see a lot of different kinds of activity: domain name with blogger, domain name with special characters, domain name with email forwarding. And suddenly you begin to discover, if you look at what Google publishes, that users are typically searching for a particular kind of use with their domain names. And not surprisingly, hosting is one of the most important things, or more specifically, websites. Because the late adopters in this industry don't really know what hosting is. They know what a website is, or they know what professional branded email is, but they may not know what hosting is. And so users are clearly thinking about domain names when they're thinking about hosting.

Now, here's where the hard part comes in. Sometimes users get it. On the left-hand side of this slide, you'll see where they understand the relationship between the domain name and the service to which it's attached: domain name with email forwarding, domain name with Shopify, domain name with Office 365. Those are all logical and appropriate uses, a domain name with a downstream service. However, there's all sorts of confusion out there as well. Sometimes end users do not understand why they're buying the domain name or what the role of the domain name is versus the service to which they're going to apply it. So why is this important to you? This is important to you because when a user lands on your website, if you're the one who clears it up, you're the one who's going to get the sale. If you don't clear it up, they may leave as mystified as they were when they first arrived.

Now, so domain names are highly related to hosting and websites. How did they perform in search? So we took a look at another category of Google data, which is how often particular types of phrases are searched for. And this compares the terms domain name, business email, and build website—pretty basic stuff. And an interesting phenomenon is how much more often people are searching for domain names, how much more traffic there is associated with people looking for domain names than there is with people looking for either email or building a website. So if your search engine marketing mix doesn't include some domain name-related terms, you're probably missing out, given what we talked about before: that is how frequently the users are actually putting the use of the domain name and the domain name search within their search terms.

Diving deeper into this data, we can see that many of the domain name search terms are in fact specifically related to domain name registration, but there are also ones that cross over into the hosting category: things like website domain name, or Google domain name, or build your own web. And on the website and business email side, there are all terms that easily commingle with each other and form a great part of a portfolio of buys in terms of Google AdWords. But what's most striking is this: if you look at the value—in other words, what's the quality of the response that you get—Google provides us with a handy tool. It is called the suggested bid, and that means what do they advise you to bid for the domain name in order to get value out of it. And it's a reasonable proxy for the value of the traffic that you would get from that particular search term.

Now, if you look at domain name, business email, and build website, they all have very similar values, very similar suggested bids. But what's critical is how frequently those search terms are used. So whereas you might get 10,000 searches on a particular build website term, you might get 10 times more on business email, and you might get 10 times more than that if you use the term domain name. So this is really critical because if you want traffic to your site—and who doesn't—if you want to capture inbound customers, you need to incorporate a variety of terms in your search engine marketing. And domain names, with their relationship to hosting, are one of the best tools that you can do.

So when an end-user looks for a domain name, we've figured out the why so far. We've figured out why do you care about domain names. Now let's figure out how you can apply them to the business. So what do end users identify when they're looking for a domain name? Well, really there are two key criteria. One of them is comfort, trust, familiarity. And a good proxy for familiarity, from a recent study done by ICANN, is frequency, or how often have I visited this type of website, how familiar am I with this particular domain ending. And unsurprisingly, many of the legacy domains as well as many of the ccTLDs ranked extremely high in this measure of how comfortable the user is in terms of using the domain name.

Another measure: awareness. A little bit different. In other words, how aware am I of this domain name in my proximity and worldwide? .com, .net, and .org ranked extremely high. So users are very aware of them and they're very comfortable with them in terms of a destination. So when you're helping one of your customers find a domain name, they ultimately want to make it very easy and very comfortable for their target end-user customer to visit their site.

Now, reliability—where I started this whole discussion—most people don't really know how reliable domain names are or are not. They don't know how reliable your hosting is or is not. But the reality is, they know when it doesn't work. And one of the things that we take great pride in at Verisign—it's what more than half the company is focused on—is making sure that .com and .net always function. And in fact, we just passed our 20-year anniversary, which means that .com and .net have never stopped resolving for 20 years continuously with zero downtime. And if you're in the hosting space, you know how many nines that might be, and it's pretty tough to get there. This is something that we take great pride in at very large scale. We have points of presence in hundreds of locations around the world, and we do this so that we can safely, securely, and with performance serve the needs of the recursive servers that ultimately serve your customers' needs.

So let's talk a little bit about what's going on right now in the marketplace in terms of domain name purchases. So last year, in 2016, in the entire year, we added about 35 million new registrations to the base of .com and .net names. What percentage of those names do you think had been registered before?

Who said 27? Pretty good, pretty good. 27 percent of the names registered last year had actually been registered, deleted, and then registered again. What's more amazing though is that 70 percent—you're dead on—70 percent of the names registered last year had never ever been registered before. There is an incredible variety of the usage of names in .com and .net, and I'm going to talk about one of the key trends that's driving this registration of new names.

So we break names down into a bunch of categories, and I'll explain what each of these are. There are keywords: fast pizza, Vegas, lucky or unlucky. These are multiple-keyword domain names, sometimes two, three, four keywords, which are descriptive of what it is the destination site is all about. And one of the advantages of using a descriptive domain name or multi-keyword domain name is it sort of tells the story before the user even has to click, and that helps get them comfortable that they know where they're going. In many ways, the generics of the world, the pizza.com, are almost unusable for the average business today because they're too broad. And so keyword domain names help narrow things down for the relevant customer set for the business, because who wants to pay for search engine marketing clicks that you really can't take action on?

Some kind is combination, which is some mix of all the other categories. Short names still play a key role; they're always those super high-flying venture-funded companies that want something very short. Chip names, so-called Chinese internet names—these are pinyin names, these are numerics. They all relate to how branding has evolved in China, and being the size of the market that it is, it has its own category. Another is IDNs, so-called internationalized domain names—domain names in non-Roman scripts all over the world that use character sets that are not the Latin script that most people in this room are familiar with. I already talked a little bit about opinions, and then lastly, pure numerics that aren't part of what is typically valuable in China. And what's important to note here is just how powerful and popular multi-keyword domain names are, and they're very easy to construct. They're the kinds of things that you see used most frequently on the Internet today.

Now, to give you a picture of what's happening with the current generation of adopters—people actually building websites, the targets that you want to hit for your customers—we use some information that we were able to derive from crawling the Internet about what website builder companies do and who the customers are and what kinds of domain names they're buying. Now, one of the reasons we use builders is that many of them are public and it's possible to get information. Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Shopify, GoCentral from GoDaddy—these are all popular web builders that allow customers to get started very, very easily, and they represent the late adopters. In many cases, the late adopters of the Internet are people who value ease-of-use and a quick solution more than anything else.

And looking at the differences between the buying patterns that we've seen in the past and these buying patterns, I think will really illustrate what we all need to do to take advantage of this. Shockingly, keywords are overrepresented amongst this group. So what does that mean? That means that this group finds descriptive domain names or brands for their businesses online to be better tools than trying to search for something else. And in fact, we see this in great commonality across, and this is increasing. Diving a little bit deeper, if we look at the overall base of .com in 2016, the new registrations that were made were frequently of two- and three-word names. 80% of all names were those two- and three-word names. However, when you look at the web builders, it shifts. Three- and four-word names start to become more of the mix, and that's because these late adopters are very comfortable with naming their business something that typing traffic is less important than recognizability in search, and they understand that and they factored it into their domain name purchases.

So now that we know that domain names are important and what kinds of domain names are at the leading edge and expansion of how people are buying domain names, how do we convince them to buy those domain names, and what will convince them to convert and buy your services? Well, it's actually a pretty simple formula. The first one is meaningful, memorable SLDs. Now, I'm speaking about the American market here. If I was in China, I would be saying something different, because the Chinese really are all about pinyin, they're all about numerics, because numbers have a very important meaning in that culture. But in the US, it's all about multi-keyword domains. In fact, in most of the Western world, it's all about multi-keyword domain names. And it's important that the keywords that the user uses actually contain the intent that they want their customer to have.

We did a study about a year ago, and while all domain names have roughly equal treatment by Google in terms of it's purely based upon the relevance of the site, the site's actual content—so they sort of ignore the domain name—what the user actually clicks on is very different. The users tend to click on domain names that contain their search terms. So if I'm looking for cheap cars, if there's a website called cheap automotive or fast cars, I'm much more likely to click on either one of those domain names than I am on a domain name that has nothing to do with my search criteria. So on the left, in the SLD, search terms. On the right, in the TLD, something they trust, something they're familiar with, something their customer is familiar with. And in the US, that would be .com and .net. In France, that would be .com or .fr. In China, that would be .com or .cn.

Now, this is where everybody here has some work to do, because finding great keyword domain names is not necessarily easy, and it's definitely not something that we all do a great job of. Now, we created this, but this is not all that different from what many web hosting companies do in terms of domain names. If you search for VegasLife.com, darn it, it's taken. Now, one irritant is people just tell you you can't have it. Now, chances are VegasLife was probably registered more than 10 years ago. Now, I came in looking for VegasLife.com. Why are you substituting a bunch of other things right of the dot instead of spinning some great ideas to the left of the dot? Well, the answer is simple: spinning used to be hard. And I'm here to tell you a little bit about how it can be easy.

So there are definitely better ways to help the customer find a domain name. We can make it easy for customers to brainstorm a domain name. We can make it easy for them. Anybody ever heard of writer's block? Sure. Writer's block is you start out with an idea and then you run out of gas after the first paragraph and you can't think of how the story should end. Most users on your sites looking for domain names have the same problem. They came in with an idea—I'm, you know, Las Vegas landscaping—and dang it, that term is already registered. What do I do now? Well, most hosting companies, most websites in fact, don't have great search capabilities or great suggestion capabilities. But there is definitely a better way to do it. Now, some people say, hey, haul out your thesaurus and start thinking about synonyms and antonyms and put 'the' in front of it or 'best' or something like that. Well, we can do much better than that.

And I'd like to give you a brief demonstration of how that can work. We're demonstrating a new user interface that helps the user with brainstorming. So let me walk you through how it works. Let's say that I'm a baker and I happen to specialize in vegan cupcakes, and I think that that's some place that nobody else is really marketing very much. So I want to be VeganCupcakes.com. So I type it in, and in this interface, you'll notice something different. Now, even though it's not available, it'll tell me what is available. You can see words that aren't available in grey and words that are available in green. So 'organic' is available, and so if I add 'organic' to this, suddenly I've got a domain name that works. Or maybe I could say something else was interesting in these lists, like I don't like 'organic', maybe I like 'healthy' instead. So magically, 'healthy' is available, and suddenly a new set of possibilities comes out below. Now, maybe I don't like either one of those, and so I want to add 'cafe' to the end. This too would result in an available name. Now, in the process of doing this, I came up with a whole host of alternatives, and so you might be able to register multiple domain names. So if I want to do a promotion or if I want to do some sort of special with my business, I can register a whole host of different domain names that can be then used as special markers in custom marketing campaigns.

Now, that was a very simple demonstration. If you go to Verisign's website, this is live on the homepage, and this is a user interface that we happen to have developed. But what's important for you is that under the covers is a very powerful, free service with a REST API that any hosting company, any registrar, can use to create great domain name suggestions. Because all those suggestions you saw were being spun in real time. They're spun based upon semantic meaning, they're spun based upon what trending topics are in the marketplace, they're spun based upon machine learning of what people are typing in. We actually look at the news, and so, you know, some weeks 'hurricane' will be a super popular term, in other weeks it won't. And this kind of power can be used underneath your tools, without changing the user interface that you're used to, to help serve your customers up better domain names and help them convert more quickly. If you'd like, we also would like to talk to you about maybe using this advanced user interface that actually provides the brainstorming capability for the users.

So in summary, hosting customers are domain customers, and you should make sure that you don't lose them by not offering domains. It's important to understand which domains are going to actually serve your purposes in both marketing terms and in terms of what you offer on your websites. And then finally, there are some fantastic tools and technologies that you can take advantage of without adding cost or complexity to your business that will help you help your customers find a great domain name. At booth 46, just in the other room, we're showing the underlying service and the API, so if any of you are technically inclined, you can have a great time talking about that. And we're also demonstrating the high-level tool if you'd like to play with that as well. With that, I'd like to thank you very much for your time and answer any questions you might have.

Yep, great, great, great question. So the question was what happens with other languages. So the underlying tool that I just described, we support ten different languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, I believe a couple of other languages that I can't remember off the top of my head, but we can answer those questions at the booth. But all those languages are supported. The other thing to note is, while my demo here was done around .com, this engine is generalized, which is to say it supports all of Verisign's TLDs and many other TLDs as well. So it's not a Verisign-only tool. I think there was a question in the back over here.

I think I was just going to ask about how the service—if you said the service was free, and if there was any limitations on it as far as like queries go. Sure, so it's—I mean, if you're technical, it's like any other REST API you've ever used in your life. It allows you to rely on the service. There's a data format for submission of queries, typically the seed terms that the end user provides you when they're on your interface, and then you can decide to present those results directly, and/or you can post-process them according to whatever business rules that you may have in terms of what you want to feature or that sort of thing. So it's a pretty straightforward integration job. We did a beta test with a group of customers over the summer; most had it integrated into their name suggestion in less than two weeks.

No, we'd love you to do that, but you're not obligated to. Yes, does it filter premium names as well? Pardon me? Premium names. The current version does not support premium names. However, feel free to talk to the folks at the booth, and I'm sure they might have further information. Yeah.

My favorite non-Verisign extension? Gosh, I don't have any favorite non-Verisign extensions, but I love .cc and .tv. Those are two of my personal favorites.

Good question. You mentioned that you have also different languages available. Yes. What would happen with extensions like .com.mx that we use in Mexico a lot, and we don't sell them through you? So correct, we're not a reseller of domain names from other registries. So we have to do availability checks using the technology that's available, and if you have ever tried to do availability checks on ccTLDs, your mileage varies. It's not always easy. Some ccTLD registries are run by one guy, so it's challenging. That said, we do availability checks on the ccTLDs and new gTLDs that we support within the product using the mechanisms that are available to us, and we present them to you alongside other results.

Other questions? Great. Well, thank you all very much for your time, and have a great show.