Click To Hit

I've been spending quite a bit of my time focusing on the Domainer or Direct Navigation space as of late. I had the great fortune to attend the Targeted Traffic Conference in Silicon Valley recently where I was able to make a lot of new contacts and also learn a ton of information on where those both inside looking out, and outside (eagerly) looking in feel this industry will lead next.

I was recently pointed to an interesting article by one of these participants that talked about a Jupiter report predicting future trends of online shoppers and one of the statements really struck me.

By 2010, 71 percent of online people will use the Internet to shop, compared with 65 percent last year. The small increase indicates that retailers will mostly be dealing with an experienced population of online shoppers who are savvy about finding free shipping and deeper discounts, the research firm said.

This peaked my interest since a while ago a veteran in the direct navigation space told me that an extremely small percentage of their traffic came from traditional search engines such as Google or Microsoft; the type of traffic that they mostly monetized was more similar to my parents who wouldn't necessarily use a seach engine to find what they were looking for. They first try to type what they want directly in the address bar of their browser and find what they are looking for on a page that has links to resources (PPC)… which at the time at least gave me the impression that the savvier you were in your search habits, the less likely you would be to follow the direct navigation food chain. (If anyone is interested you can learn the basics of how direct navigation operates by reading this)

Now I know that's a simple analogy where there are more complexities to the mix, but I think we can all agree that most of the ebb and flow of search traffic primarily revolves around where surfers find the most relevant targeted results. If search technology continues to improve and more and more shoppers become aware of tools that provide a wider and deeper degree of relevant results, would such a large segment of online shoppers (even my parents) continue to type a generic domain into an address bar as their first choice of search?

On the other hand, with the increases in the development of domain properties into actual applications (Businesses), and what I feel will be an inevitable trend to include more rich and related content, photos, videos, and even shopping interfaces directly into PPC / Lander pages, direct navigation results should become more and more relevant to even the savviest of surfers potentially even “training” search traffic to migrate from google or MSN towards direct navigation for their primary source of shopping resources.

Which of the two wins out or does the balance continue? I tend to think that even with the staggering pace of technological developments in the search race (RSS etc…) the building out of domain properties beyond just a directory of links (as has traditionally been the case) will at least offset any attrition to traditional search by “basic surfers” if not morph this vertical into something potentially even greater than what it is today.