One of the best decisions I made while developing Lean Domain Search was to ask visitors which registrar they use after their third search. By asking you which registrar you use, I can customize the interface to make registering domain names through that registrar easier for you which in turn leads to higher affiliate revenue for me.
For example, after your third search you will see something like this:
If you select Namecheap, the Register Now link you’re shown when you click on an available domain name is tailored to use Namecheap, making it easier for you to purchase the domain name:
Lean Domain Search stores your selection in a cookie so that you get that customized experience every time you use Lean Domain Search in the future.
If you select None of the above you are asked which registrar you use that way I can keep track of which registrars I’m not supporting and add them if they are popular enough.
All of this information is tracked using MixPanel, which makes it really easy to segment your data afterwards. In this case, I want to see which registrars people select when their initial referrer is HackerNews:
You can then export the results as a CSV file so you can perform your own analysis.
With more than 1,500 visitors from HackerNews this year who have selected a registrar, here’s the breakdown of which registrars they selected when prompted:
NameCheap comes in at 36% followed by GoDaddy with 27%, Gandi with 6%, and Dreamhost with 3%. The “Other” category is made up of the rest of the registrars that are displayed, all of which come in at less than 2% of the total: Hover, Moniker, Enom, Network Solutions, a123reg, Bluehost, Dynadot, and NameTerrific. 19% selected “None of the above” and 94% of those people did not enter a registrar when asked which one they use.
Because almost 1 in 5 visitors from HackerNews selected none of the above and did not enter a registrar, we can’t say with certainty that exactly 36% of all HackerNews users use Namecheap. There also might be some difference between the average HackerNews user and one who performs three or more searches on a domain search tool. It’s possible, for example, that the more tech savvy of a HackerNews user you are the more likely you are to use a domain search tool and the more likely you are to use Namecheap instead of GoDaddy, while less savvy users are less likely to use a domain search tool and more likely to use GoDaddy.
What we can say is that Namecheap is extremely popular among the HackerNews community, which won’t come as a surprise to many after GoDaddy’s initial SOPA support and HackerNews’s vehement reaction.
What do you use? Namecheap, GoDaddy, or something else? Comments on HackerNews here.
If you’d like to check out Lean Domain Search for yourself, click here to head on over to the homepage.
Lean Domain Search 