Weekends often fly by when your having fun, especially this past weekend as I attended a Men’s Retreat.
I kicked off this past weekend by getting on the road and heading to T Bar M Camps & Retreats for my home church’s, Mosaic Church Austin, annual Men’s Retreat.
I managed to escape Austin’s nightmarish traffic to head south to New Braunfels, Texas.
In route, I spotted quite a few domains being advertised across various media that I’ll likely write about in the coming weeks and months.
Nevertheless, the one domain encounter that caught me by surprise was a billboard touting a .land domain extension.
I was about 15 minutes from my destination when I spotted the following billboard: VintageOaks.Land.
It was exciting and intriguing as this is my first .land domain extension encountered in the wild.
With real estate a highly competitive market, I was excited to see forward thinking individuals making good use of a domain via a billboard advertisement.
I was more impressed when I arrived home after the Men’s Retreat to discover that VintageOaks.Land forwards to VintageOaksTexas.com (nice geo domain usage).
But what really was the icing on the cake with a cherry on top was discovering that the VintageOaks.Land domain forward to VintageOaksTexas.com is using Google Analytics Tracking (VERY IMPRESSIVE).
VintageOaks.Land forwards to the following URL address:
http://www.vintageoakstexas.com/?utm_source=vintageoaks.land&utm_campaign=domain_billboard&utm_medium=domain_billboard
If you’re lost, then I encourage you to read Measuring Domain Name Redirects Using Google Analytics Campaign Tracking.
In short, Google Analytics Tracking is a great tool to use to analyze your web marketing tactics.
In this case, VintageOaksTexas.com likely wants to gauge how well their billboard investment drives traffic to their website.
They could use VintageOaksTexas.com on the billboard, but then they wouldn’t be able to clearly segment the traffic sources, which is likely why they chose to use VintageOaks.Land as a secondary domain.
Promoting secondary domains on all advertising is one of the easiest methods to gain clear insight to how effective chosen advertising options.
If you desire to know whether your newspaper, magazine, online, billboard, tv or any other ad options are worth their investment, then simply combine use of Google Analytics tracking and secondary domains forwarded to your main address.
Lastly, I was eager to know whether or not the matching .com was registered. And to my surprise, VintageOaksLand.com is registered and it forwards to HillCountryLandAndHomes.com.
However, the bad news is that unlike VintageOaks.Land, VintageOaksLand.com is not using Google Analytics Tracking and is missing a great opportunity to understand their source of web traffic.
I don’t believe VintageOaksLand.com and VintageOaks.Land to be owned by the same person(s).
But I do wonder how much traffic VintageOaksLand.com receives because of VintageOaks.Land domain usage and web users likely mistyping the address?
Nevertheless, this past weekend at the Men’s Retreat was much needed and I really enjoyed our time bonding with one another in the Lord with an added bonus of a few domain encounters. That’s all for now…
As a domain investor and business consultant, Alvin actively participates in daily domain auctions. Outside of auctions, he passionately shares his views, opinions, and vision for how businesses should and should not use domain names to generate greater customer growth and revenue.
