Verisign's Scott Schnell Explains How Domain Names can Drive Hosting Sales

Good morning. My goal today is to share with you some interesting information about the relationship between hosting and domain names. You'll be surprised to hear how tightly they are related. Of course, you deal with them every day, right? You're always configuring name servers and getting things to work together, but they're much more linked in the user's mind than you might think, and you can use that to your advantage to drive hosting sales. We're going to talk about three key topics. The first one is how domain names can drive better conversion for your marketing efforts. The outreach you do, the advertising you do, the search engine marketing you do—all of it can be more effective if you use domain names as part of your marketing mix. The second one is what do customers actually want in a domain name, and the third one is how can you help them find it, because that is actually the last mile, the most difficult part of actually using domain names to drive your business. So with that, let's dive in. Let's look at some data, and there's nowhere better to look at data than Google. They live in data, they swim in data, and luckily for all of us, they provide a lot of this data publicly. So what you're looking at here is Google's analysis of what people look for when they look for domain names. Anybody here use Google search before? Oh, come on, everybody, right? Unless you live in China, you've used Google search. When you type, there's a thing called autocomplete. How does autocomplete know what to put next? Well, the way they know what to put next is they carefully study and analyze what people look for in their searches and what they click on, and they use that information to suggest things for autocomplete because they want to help that user more quickly get to a search. And not surprisingly, some things—in fact, the majority of things that they're looking for when they look for a domain name—have to do with what they're going to do with it. And if you, in fact, can see this tiny text above me, they're talking about domain names with email, domain names with hosting, domain names with website, domain names with Facebook presence. They're talking about using a domain name with online presence. And so that's an opportunity for you. This information points to a very high frequency of domain name searches that actually have an intent to buy hosting. When we dive a little bit deeper into this data, we also see how confused the user can be. Sometimes the email—the user gets it. They know that they're going to use a domain name with email forwarding, or they know they're going to use it with Shopify, or they know they're going to use it with Wix, or your hosting package, or they're going to use it with an email product. But sometimes they're deeply confused. They don't know the difference between a domain name and a CNAME. They don't know the difference between domain names and hosting, or canonical names, or other kinds of terminology that oftentimes baffle and confuse the user. And the number one learning that you can take away from this is that on your website, when you're presenting users with domain name options, make sure you make it very, very simple. Don't confuse them. Don't get them lost in your control panel configuring records. Make it easy for them to accomplish the purposes they try and accomplish most often, which is typically: how do I get my domain name to point to my website? How do I get my domain name to point to a name server for email? And if you can do that very quickly and effectively, you will more quickly convert your customer. So we know domain name interest often means interest in something else, and more often than not, that's some sort of web presence, a website. So when users are doing searches online and you're thinking about doing search engine marketing, what kind of terminology should you be using in your SEM? Well, it turns out if you're limiting yourself to hosting-related terms, you're missing a lot of prospective customers. And the reason is that domain name searches are literally larger than the combination of searches for email and for hosting—larger than those two combined. And most of those domain name searches have an intent to use in them. They're actually earlier in the sales cycle. So if you want to catch the customer and guide them early towards your product or service, try using some domain name terms as part of your email mix. Now, if we dive a little bit deeper to find some insight in those search trends, which have been very, very consistent over time, we find linkage: website, domain name, business, email address. Those implicitly imply the binding of a service together with a domain name to form a solution for the customer, and you should take advantage of that in the way you want to get your domain name. So the other thing you see in this, which should be no shock, is that everybody wants free. Probably 30% of all the results, or all the related terms in this search, are for free. Well, does free mean they really want it free, or does free mean that's their opening offer to try and find a great value? We believe it's the latter. In fact, if you look at another part of Google—Google AdWords and AdSense—Google gives us some insight into what the value is in terms of a convertible customer that will become revenue for searches related to website building, email, and domain names. And not surprisingly, when you look at it, they all have very similar bid values—suggested bid values. This is what Google tells you, based upon their experience, will likely get you a reasonable share of results in AdWords. But more compellingly is the size of the available opportunity. Domain name searches literally are ten times larger than email and a hundred times larger than hosting-related searches. So you have a great opportunity by blending domain name-related search terms into your outbound marketing, your advertising, your SEM, your SEO on your website to get more customers for your services. So this is all great theory. It's nice to see Google's statistics. Let's see a real-world example of domain names used to drive the sales of a downstream service. Now, how many of you watch American football? Anybody? Anybody watch the Super Bowl this year? Anybody a Patriots fan? Greatest upset in the history of American football. No team has ever come from behind. Did I mention I used to live in Boston? Anyway, it was an incredible game, and as usual, there were an incredible set of commercials. And I want to show you a particular commercial that illustrates my point.

All he did was talk about domain names. Now, implicit, however, was he wanted to build a website. He was starting a business. He was getting going. But the domain name captures the very essence of his idea. It captures why he's doing what he's doing, and that's because your domain name becomes your online brand. And there's nothing more powerful to get a customer to move than to get them wrapped around an idea that they can't let go of. And the beauty of domain names is they're like snowflakes. There's billions of them, but no two are alike. And so if you want to get it, there's a sense of urgency to get it now, and that's something that's unique about using domain names to drive customers to take action now as opposed to some point in the future. So, all right, a couple other points about this ad. Did anybody watch the Super Bowl last year? Do you remember Squarespace's ad last year? Anybody remember Squarespace's ad from last year? It was about hosting. It featured equal star power, Key & Peele, two of the most successful, well-paid rappers in the world. However, it performed much more poorly than this ad. In fact, you can look at internet public statistics to figure it out. This ad generated substantially more traffic in the weeks before the Super Bowl, during the Super Bowl, and after the Super Bowl than the 2016 ad. So we actually have real-world evidence that leads us to the same conclusion as Google's data. So hopefully, I've convinced you that domain names are a good thing for your business. Now, let's talk about how you get it done. First of all is what users want. Well, users want the same things that you want. First of all, they want traffic. They want to get a domain name that has a proven track record of driving traffic. Now, in any country in the world, Germany being a good example, the ccTLD is a good bet, great traffic driver within Germany. However, if you want to reach a global audience or expand your horizons to the rest of Europe, then looking at adding a generic TLD is a great idea. And no TLD drives more traffic than .com. Second thing you want to look at is awareness. How many users are already aware of a TLD? Because awareness breeds trust and confidence and the willingness to click on a link, whereas if you don't know something, you might be hesitant to click on that link. And .com has even higher awareness than it does traffic, so it's a very safe bet in terms of driving users or potential customers to one of your customers' websites. And a third thing is reliability. For the last nearly 20 years, this upcoming June, .com has resolved every second of every day of every week of every month of every year. And in fact, .com has never had a moment of downtime for the last 19 years, approaching 20. And that's considering that there are over 126 million .coms in operation today around the world, and that results in about 145 billion transactions a day. In fact, during the time I give this speech, there will be over three billion authoritative resolutions of .com within Verisign's infrastructure, and many, many hundreds of times more within the recursive infrastructure that's distributed around the world. So .com is reliable. And there's another way that .com is reliable: it's reliable in pricing. .com has had very stable pricing for the last 20 years, and that is in stark contrast to some of what we see going on in the rest of the TLD industry. So if we know what customers want and we know that it works, how do we get them a domain name that converts? The formula is very simple: a meaningful, memorable SLD—the part to the left of the dot—combined with a well-trusted TLD to the right of the dot. In Germany, that might mean .de or .com. In the US, it probably means .com. In China, it probably means .com or .cn. How do you get a meaningful, memorable SLD? That's the trick. Unfortunately—or fortunately, I should say—there's plenty of .coms available. Now, some would tell you that there aren't great .coms available, and yes, pizza.com is in fact registered. But for the typical customer that you're serving, pizza.com is not a great domain name. You need something that is more meaningful for their business. They're probably not a pizza shop delivering pizzas everywhere in the world. So you want to give them something that helps suggest to the customer the nature of their business, maybe where their business is, maybe the style of business that they have. And in fact, when we look at the domain names sold by hosting companies, that's typically what gets sold. What gets sold is multi-keyword domain names that are suggestive of the business that your customer is in. And the good news is those names are available. We looked at availability of typical two- and three-keyword domain names in literature, so this isn't something we made up. This is what people read every day. And across the major European languages, more than 80% of domain names on average are still available, haven't been registered yet. Even in English, which is where .com started, there's still almost 70% of names available. So tremendous availability. The question is: how do you help the user get that name in their mind that they want to go for? Now, when we looked a little bit deeper, some surprising words still haven't been registered. So, for example, in German, 'neuen' means 'new,' like 'new media.' 'Neuen Medium' is not registered. 'Ultimate Demonstration' not registered. 'Forma' and 'Develop Individual' not registered. These are really obvious domain names. So these aren't some esoteric things with hyphens and numbers and dashes and spaces. These are plain old all-alphabetic character names. So how do we help users find that great name? Well, unfortunately, this is where things break, and you need to do a better job of helping the user think about domain names. What was one of the greatest advances in search? Autocomplete, right? It eliminated you having to remember the whole domain name. You simply had to remember the beginning of it, and Google would suggest for you alternatives on where to go. And in fact, this is the kind of thing that many try and are not successful in. Now, the easy way out that some people use is: I go in and I want 'schneller.com,' but 'schneller.com' is taken. It's a very common word in the German language, and so not surprisingly, it's taken. However, instead of suggesting what I want—which is I want .com, maybe I want .de, but I want .com for sure—I get a whole bunch of things that are too expensive and they're not what I want. I don't even know what they are. They're not familiar to me. And so what we need to do is give the customer what they want. Now, one way to do that is to help the customer with information. It's very hard to suggest names because typically all you have is a string the customer typed in. Now, maybe there's more information you can ask the customer for. In fact, that's the first step in a solution: ask the customer for information. What's the nature of your business? What are you going to do online? Who's your customer? What town are you in? Who do you aim to serve? And in fact, most users already have this information online, and they already make it available in many cases. What am I talking about? I'm talking about Facebook, and I'm talking about your public profile in Facebook. In your public profile on Facebook, you probably have your interests, you probably have your hometown, you probably have your job, you probably have your hobbies and your vacations. And if you're going to start a new business, much of the time it has to do with what you're excited in and inspired about. And so Verisign has been experimenting with different ways to do name suggestion. One of them has to do with Facebook, and this tool is live today. You can go see it after the speech today if you want to try it out. It's called domaininspiration.com, and what you do very simply is you go to the site, it tells you to add your first and last name or whatever you would like, and it offers to connect to Facebook. And when you approve, it will look in your public profile, it will inspect what you're doing. And in the case of Genie here, my test subject, she paints portraits. Now, she might not have thought of—she probably thought of, you know, dramaticart.com or something else that she couldn't get. But guess what? mcphersonportraits.com is in fact available, and she was able to get that name. And by claiming it, Verisign then sends her on to any one of a number of registrars who are ready to fulfill that order. You can adopt a similar technology with your customers. You can use information they may have in their account, with their permission. You can look at whatever website work they've already done within your hosting environment to look at maybe the SEO they've done, or the keywords that they've embedded, or the content on their site, and you can suggest great domain names based on that. What we can do much, much better than this—and this is what I'm very excited about showing you today—we can make it easy for customers by helping them brainstorm. One of the biggest blocks people have is they come to your website, they say, 'I want schneller.com,' they type it in, they say 'go,' and it's not available, and they get writer's block. They are completely blocked. They don't know where to go next because they only came in with one idea. So the real question is: how do we give them more ideas? How do we help them brainstorm? And at Verisign, on our labs organization, we're developing a prototype that will help you and others figure out how to brainstorm great names. And let me show you what I mean. This is a tool that helps brainstorm and autocomplete domain names, and it does so by suggesting available domain names and using an embedded thesaurus and other semantic tools to make sure that those name suggestions are relevant. Now, I'm going to do a demonstration here because I'm helping my wife start a business, and she wants to start a business selling purses she makes handmade. And so I wanted to start with the term 'leathergoods.com.' So I type in 'leathergoods.com' and I hit return. Now, 'leather goods' is a nice broad term. I figured it'd appeal to a lot of customers, but unfortunately, it's not available. Now, the way this tool works is unavailable names are gray and available names are yellow. So as you can see, 'leathergoods.com' is not available. However, I love the word 'classic,' and so if I click on the word 'classic,' it's automatically put into the domain name, and voila, the name is available. Now, I could register that name, but wow, look at all these great other domain names that are available in .com. She's saying, oh, she likes 'elegant' better than I like 'classic,' so we're going to substitute 'elegant.' And I did say she was making handbags, so we clicked on 'handbags.' So it does both addition and substitution. It tells you which other TLDs I could register the name in as well. And since she might branch out into other areas, perhaps she wants to find other domain names to register that she can use to drive traffic to her site to sell more product. So in about 30 seconds, we just found three fantastic domain names for a brand new business in .com, the most popular domain ending in the world, which everybody says is full, but clearly it's not. There are literally billions of available domain names, and this is a really simple way to make them available to your customers. Now, in closing, I've got actually four things to say. The first three are: number one, I hope you come away from this presentation with a better understanding of how domain names can drive customers to buy hosting, because you're going to intercept them earlier in the consideration cycle. Number two, to understand: sell your customer what they want and help them understand what their options are, and help them find better domain names. Now, the tool that I included as part of my presentation today is actually being demonstrated in prototype form in the internet lounge, which is outside the exposition hall to the left, and we would love to show it to you. This is a tool which can be embedded in your site. If you get your imagination fired and want to create one yourself, you know, good for you, that's great too. But our goal is to help you provide your customers with a simpler path to find a great domain name so that they can go to a paying customer as part of your service. Thanks very much for attending the session today, and have a great show.