The one thing i never tested - using hyphenated domains.

Would the domain Blue-Keyword.com have a higher ctr than BlueKeyword.com

[SlimKim]

I think i must have tried every other thing i could think of over the years, in an effort to increase CTR, but only now has hyphenated domains occurred to me.

Who has tried it and measured against the non-hyphenated version of a 2 word domain and what did you learn?

Thanks for sharing,
Slim

[Atun]

They were 'in' a few years ago. I still have a whole bunch. At the time, it was suggested that SE's had an easier time parsing them.


However, saw no benefit in Adwords. Since the user sees only the display domain, you can catch their attention just as well with proper capitalization in the display domain name.

WidgetShop.com is more appealing than widget-shop.com for a display domain I now believe. Yeah, I could say Widget-Shop.com but see no advantage anymore -- if there ever even was an advantage.

Atun

[SlimKim]

Thanks for your reply.

With billions and billions of adwords impressions spanning several years, i was always surprised that an exact match domain name such as the ad title such as BlueWidget.com with ad title Blue Widgets would have a significant lesser CTR than my best ctr domain.

And i was further surprised to see half the ctr or less from my best ctr name to another with only small changes in the name, as in BlueWidget.com to BlueItem.com and i attributed the difference to more peoples finding "widget" more credible / professional than "item".

People are trained to mostly use non-hyphenated names and i do think the non-hyphenated version is better than using a hyphen and thank you for sharing your experience confirming that.

[RhinoFish]

the vanity sub-folder you chose for your display url is way, way more important than the hyphen or not question.

so is use of ad text capitalization, punctuation, and allowed funky chars.

i'd say learning to use mod broad or dki effectively also far outweighs display url domain or subfolder issues.

[SlimKim]

interesting - lots of things i never considered

[Atun]

People are trained to mostly use non-hyphenated names

Indeed, SlimKim!

I was going to mention that too though that was outside of your request for Adwords experiences.

We all want people to easily type in our site names too in and many folks cannot manage to find or remember that hyphen.

In fact on some older, more popular hyphenated domains that I own, I even bought the non-punctuated version and had it redirect to the hypenated sites.

Atun