Watch Saw.com CEO Jeff Gabriel discuss Google trends as they relate to domain name appraisals. In the video, Jeff explains that Google trends can tell you how often a keyword is searched on Google, which correlates to the worth of a domain name containing that keyword. Jeff provides a handful of examples to illustrate this point:
My name is Jeff Gabriel. I am the CEO and co-founder of Saw.com.
In my tenure, I’ve had the opportunity to appraise tens of thousands of domain names. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the metrics and things that I do to quickly and easily appraise a domain.
One of my favorite parts of the appraisal process is looking at the market trends having to do with the keyword that makes up the domain name. In case you don’t know what a keyword is, it’s the word before the dot-com in a domain. A little company that you might know called Google has something called Trends. If you go to Trends.Google.com, you can actually search the keywords that you’re looking at and make some comparisons to see if there’s growth, stagnation, or if the keyword that the domain name makes up is actually losing searches.
One of the things easiest things that I can show you is the difference between the keyword of software versus the keyword of app. When was the last time you purchased “software” and how many times have you recently talked about apps? Even to the point that if you download what we used to call software; they’re calling it an application on your computer. If you compare the two terms “software” versus “app,” you can see that this goes back to 2004. In 2004, “software” with was king and the term “app” wasn’t being searched at all. But now you can see the inverse. At one period of time, they crossed and term “software” continues to die and level out while the term “app” has grown exponentially and continues to organically grow.
One of the other terms that I love to look at when discussing domain name value is Harlem shake. That was a dance that all kinds of people loved watching and it was very trendy, but then it died as quick as it came. The value of that domain name went up just as fast and then it went down, just as fast, like a roller coaster.
So I showed you two different keywords, one that was on its way out, “software,” and the other one that continues to grow in popularity, “app.” I’m making an analogy between the trends of those two domain names and showing a direct correlation to the values of those two domain names. In 2004 “software” would be worth considerably more money than “app.” Now, “app” is worth considerably more money than “software.” In reality, even though the values of domain names have continued to grow since the early 2000s, “software” has probably gone down in value over the last few years.
Now let’s take a look at another example which I really like. And I’ll be honest with you; trends.Google.com has sent me down the rabbit hole many times searching all kinds of different things. This example is suntan lotion, and as you can see, there are many different waves going up and down here and that obviously coincides with vacation season in the summertime. Now the other thing that we can look at, not just looking at the seasonal behavior of suntan lotion, but we can actually look at the states that use it the most. States like Montana don’t seem to think they need suntan lotion when they go outside, so this gives you other valuable information about potential target audiences and about the types of people who are going to purchase suntan lotion.
Trends google.com is a wonderful source of information to help you find the value of domain names and it really helps you when it comes to consumable types of domains like suntan lotion, applications, and software.
Now it isn’t a great source of information if you’re selling a domain name like shout.com which falls into the brandable category. Not all of the metrics that I’m providing are relevant to every single domain name that you might like to appraise.
If you’d like to learn more about appraising domain names or anything about domain names, you can go to Saw.com and click on our resources button. There’s plenty of information there that you can use to learn about domains or anything having to do with domains.
