The guys at Memorable Domains ran a study which showed that: “All other things being equal (same headline, same ad copy, same bids, same landing page etc.) the ads that used an on-topic generic domain name received up to twice the clicks that ads using a “coined” non-generic domain name did”.

Full details of the experiment and the results obtained can be found in the report at http://www.memorabledomains.co.uk/ppcanalysis.pdf

The results are something that many of us might have guessed at, but it’s nice to see some specific figures to back-up that intuition. Part of the reason could be down an increased ‘trust’ by the visitor in the generic sounding domain name, but the report proposes some more specific reasons, and certainly gives some food for thought.

Read the report – it’s only a few pages long. I hope it will encourage you to do some experimentation of your own with generic names.

Thanks to Memorable Domains for permission to post about this.