In the beginning of April the Iceland’s volcano spews lava and shoots a cloud of ash into air. All flights are canceled, people have no way to get back home, big air company’s losing millions of dollars and the cloud causes travel chaos over Europe. But we are glad that it’s over and the flights are back.

What impact did the volcanic ash had on domains?

The ash cloud hit even some domain owners. Maybe they got stock in some airport and did not have the chance to renew the domains. We don’t know what really happened but today there are some “Airport” auctions ending on GoDaddy Auctions:

These domains are just a small pick from our Premium Domains list. To see the full list of the Premium Domains you have to join ExpiredDomains.ORG. The domains average valuation in the list is $1,005 and you can test-drive our service and steal the list of Premium Domains for $4.95. Click here to steal ‘em righ now!

Today we will take a deeper look at the traffic graphics of expiring domains provided by two most popular web traffic estimation tools and see what domains to avoid.

Domain Traffic Estimation Tools

There are several good online tools that can estimate web traffic. The first one is Compete.com and the second Quantcast.com. Our experience shows us that you will find most data from Compete.com.

How do they collect the data?

Compete.com:

“Compete’s clickstream data are collected from a 2,000,000 member panel of US Internet users (about a 1% sample), using diverse sources. Using a rigorous statistical normalization methodology, Compete creates precise projections of the behavior of the entire US Internet browser population on monthly and weekly basis. In addition, Compete provides daily estimates of share of consumer attention garnered by the top Internet sites and the velocity of change of this attention. ”

Quantcast.com:

“Our core traffic metrics are based on data collected with cooperation of online publishers participating in Quantcast Publisher Program program. When someone loads a web page or other media bearing a Quantcast tag into their browser, the browser will request an invisible, one-pixel image from Quantcast’s servers.

During the pixel transaction we request the browser to store a randomly generated number in a Quantcast cookie on the user’s machine. The browser may or may not store the cookie depending on its capabilities and settings. Assuming it did, on subsequent requests it will send this number back to us. The number allows us to tell whether we’ve seen this browser before, and to count the distinct cookies associated with a site’s traffic.”

Visit both sites and try out some domains just to get an idea and a feeling for traffic graphics. The ExpiredDomains.ORG backend system always performs a check on both sites.

Now let’s take a look at the three types of domains that you can identify looking at the traffic graphics and what can you do with them.

Promotional Domains

Promotional domains are used for online marketing campaigns. The domains are mostly registered for one single year. It is very easy to identify such domains. Looking at our example you can see a big traffic spike between February and April and after that the traffic is lost. As soon as the company stopped the promotion the traffic was gone.

There is nothing much to do with promotional domains as their living period is very short and you can not recover the paid traffic.

The Expiring Domains

Domains that are let to expire. The traffic is dropping and is gone before the domain expires.

You will not get much traffic from such domains. You should try to find out the reason why the domain is expiring. Look at the history if it is possible. Sites are moving to new domains and webmasters are letting the old domains to expire without forwarding the traffic to the new domain.

Established Domains

Established domains are more than one year old with stable traffic that was coming through out the last year and did not end before the domain expired.

You can see one good example. The domain had between 4000 and 10,000 unique visitors and the traffic did not decrease much.

Such domains will most likely have backlinks or indexed pages on search engines. Always check the history of such domains. Try a search on Archive.org or just google site:domainname.com and look for a cached version of the site. You do not want to bid on a keyword domain that had “pr0n” as the main content.

Please let us know in the comments, what is your experience with expiring domains and traffic estimations? Did you have any success or failures?