Simple or complex? Which is better for customers?
You have lots of options when it comes to parking your domain names. With over a dozen parking services on the market, all promising you the “highest payouts”, how do you decide which one is best? Ultimately, you want to go where the money is. But another consideration is which service is easiest to use.
There are two sides of the spectrum on complexity. On one hand is Parked.com, which takes about three minutes to start loading domains, manage them, and track stats. On the other hand is Sedo, which has an extremely complex parking system that requires multiple clicks to get anything done.
Why is Sedo so complex? Well, partly because it has some of the richest statistics available on any parking platform. You can drill down on each domain to see all of your referrals to each domain for an unlimited period of time, which helps you understand where the traffic is coming from for each domain. You can also see each keyword clicked and what language it was clicked in. You can pull up graphs showing the number of queries, click, click-through rates, epc, rpm, and earnings. You can layer another graph on top of that with one of the other variables. You can choose between bar graphs and line graphs.
But all of those statistics come with a price — it creates a Paradox of Choice. If you login to your SedoPro console looking for a particular domain, you are several clicks (and a bit of frustration) away from it.
On the other hand, Parked is quick and easy to use, but doesn’t offer the same level of statistics that Sedo does. You can view referring URLs and countries, but only for the past 5 days. It doesn’t have graphs and data you can cut in multiple ways.
Which one of these services do I prefer? Well, it’s a love-hate relationship. I love the data I get with Sedo, but hate the complexity. I appreciate the simplicity and high payouts from Parked, but yearn for just a bit more data.
Ideally, we’ll see Sedo hire a user interface designer to make it easier to navigate, and Parked will beef up its stats.
Rudy (Logistik Labs) says
Great article Andrew!
I agree that the complexity of Sedo is in direct correlation to the extensive data stats you can obtain with their interface. I’m a Sedo man myself. Have been for awhile. They’ve never steered me wrong. I almost always suggest Parked.com to any newbies in the domain game and it seems after awhile, they gradually migrate to the elaborate stats of Sedo. Keep up the great work!
Rudy
Logistik Labs
Andrew says
Thanks for your comment. Although I wouldn’t say Parked isn’t just for newbies. They seem to pay a lot and I know a number of big domainers who use them.
sumbini says
I also use, both, Parked and Sedo Pro. I also like the higher payouts and easy to use platform of Parked. In addition with Parked, I am able to edit keywords, as well as add text and even pictures to individual pages. Sedo Pro’s stats are helpful and great but I agree that their interface takes too long to navigate through, and in the end, payout beats stats for everyone I know.
DomainerPro says
I wrote a detailed reply and when I entered the verification code below wrong, it was wiped out. These little code boxes drive me crazy! Anyway, to summarize what I said, I spend a lot of time optimizing my SedoPro domains based on the detailed stats – maybe two hours a day. The result is very high CTR’s on the order of 20% to 75%. You can’t beat that. One thing that will help is Sedo’s new feature that lets you set related links for all the domains in a single category.
Shuwix says
Yes. Parked is best. Sedo is total rip-off, they have about 20-30% payouts comparing to Parked, Fabulous, Namedrive or WhyPark.
Visit one great Parking comparison (click on my nick) to see screenshot stats from different people on different domains and different companies.