My Latest Experiment – Buying Expired Domains with Traffic

I’ve been talking about expired domains on my blog a lot lately and thought I would share an experiment I’m currently testing-out over at Go Daddy Auctions. I usually write about case studies after I’ve done something but this time around I thought I’d share the entire experiment with all of you. Since what I’m talking about here is indeed an experiment it could turn-out to be a terrible investment so I’ll preface what is to follow with the harsh reality that sometimes these things just don’t work-out. However that’s why I’m doing the experiment – to collect data and see what works!

Lately I’ve been looking more and more and Go Daddy’s traffic estimation on their expired domains. From my knowledge these traffic estimates come from Go Daddy’s parking service which should give you a good indication of the amount of type-in traffic the domain receives. For my experiment I’d like to see if the traffic numbers that Go Daddy cites accurately reflect the level of type-in traffic you will see on the given domain.

My budget for the experiment is $1,000 and I’m planning on purchasing 2-5 domains depending on what traffic stats they have. Generally I’m going to focus on names with traffic above 5,000 visitors/month. Once I acquire the domain I’ll be parking it at TrafficZ and Why Park which both provide good basic analytics statistics. To avoid anyone influencing my results I will not release the domain names that I purchase on my blog – I want clean data! I will however release the information about the name, i.e. how much traffic it has, when it was registered, and of course how much I paid.

To test the traffic estimates I’ll be letting these names sit parked for 3-months and then pull the average monthly traffic and see how this compares to Go Daddy’s estimates. Once the experiment has been completely I’m more than happy to share the domain names along with my findings. Given all the great opportunities with expired domains I think this could be an exciting avenue to explore.

As usual I’ll update all of you along the way and provide detailed analysis at the end. If anyone has experience buying high-traffic domains from Go Daddy please feel free to share below or shoot me an email. It’s always great to learn from each other and I hope this experiment helps me and all of you find some good expired domains with existing traffic.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton