MarkMonitor recently conducted its second installment of ‘office hours’: a series of interactive, Q&A focused webinars highlighting the most pressing topics in domain management today.
The MarkMonitor™ office hours series, following a university office hours model, provides MarkMonitor customers the ability to ask questions on a variety of domain-related topics with real-time answers from MarkMonitor in-house experts and industry colleagues. To encourage candor, questions are anonymized and the sessions are not recorded.
July 2020 office hours: domain portfolio analysis
This office hours session focused on portfolio analysis: what it is, how it works and the areas we examine when analyzing domain name portfolios for optimization. For this webinar, our in-house specialists were joined by one of our industry-leading clients who shared their experience on the benefits domain portfolio analysis can bring, as well as the challenges to overcome. Here are a few valuable takeaways.
- As a first step, automated domain scoring is a quick and easy way to rank all your domains in the MarkMonitor portal. To help clients realize the full potential of portfolio analysis, MarkMonitor considers business data like global footprint and trademark portfolio, scores and ranks third-party-owned domains, and identifies meaningful coverage gaps.
- Approaches to domain portfolio management can differ across countries, particularly when it comes to the management of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). The panelists also discussed their experiences with new gTLDs and some felt the primary challenge was the pure volume of new gTLDs (500+) and not knowing where to start. The consensus was that there is no single best strategy, but the solution could be a combination of blocking to cover large swaths of new gTLDs and/or spot registering strategically.
- One area of high concern for some industries is the issue of IDN homographs – lookalike domains that utilize non-Latin scripts for nefarious registration to target organizations’ primary websites. Organizations should focus on protection efforts within the .com space with defensive IDN homograph registrations and define how far they should go to reduce the risk to the greatest extent possible.
Further questions that arose during the webinar were around the possibility of adding bespoke data points, ranking of brands during optimization and the optimum frequency to review portfolio strategies.
In an evolving and rapidly expanding digital world, optimizing and protecting your domain portfolio can be a challenging task. With the support of the right expertise and adoption of best practice approaches such as brand mapping, functional assessments and annual reviews, you can maximize efficiency and optimize your portfolio value for years to come.
As the registrar for many of the most visited domain names on the internet, MarkMonitor tracks industry developments to help customers make the best decisions. For a copy of the prepared background slides from the session or to get in touch to discuss domain portfolio analysis, please contact us here.
