Whether people confuse a .com domain name with those ending with a new gTLD is a question Bill Hartzer sought to answer in a recent post on his blog.
Hartzer writes âif you have a domain name like whatever.widgets, those who are fans of .COM domain names say that whatever.widgets will lose traffic to someone mistyping it. The argument is that theyâll type in whatever.widgets.com or whateverwidgets.com (and not type in whatever.widgets).â
âItâs widely known that many people mistake the search form for the URL bar in their web browser. In Firefox, for example, the search field is right to the right of where you enter a URL. So, I do know that people mistake both of these fields. Thatâs good news, as we can actually see how many people do a keyword search for a particular domain name. For example, theyâll put the domain name into the search field, making it a keyword search at Google.â
Hartzer gives the example of âbooking.yeahâ which was used in a promotional campaign for booking.com. In his post Hartzer uses data provided by a couple of companies that show searches internet users have made based on the commercial from booking.com.
There are several thousand keyword searches analysed, but in none of the searches do internet users put â.comâ or âcomâ in their searches. Which leads Hartzer to conclude:
âIf people really did enter .COM or COM somewhere, and people really did mistake a new gTLD domain name for a .COM domain name, wouldnât there be searches showing up that include âcomâ? Again, this is a real-world example, using booking.yeah, which does have a huge marketing campaign behind it.â
To read Hartzerâs post in full with the stats used, go to:
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/people-confuse-new-gtld-domains-com-domains/