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SmartName Domain Parking Service Review |
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Thursday, 24 January 2008 |
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 In May 2007, NameMedia aquired ActiveAudience therefore also inheriting SmartName. Since then, NameMedia has worked to improve SmartName.
Acceptance Rates
Fewer than 1 out of 10. SmartName is a premuim parking program only available under certain restrictions. It's the sister site of ActiveAudience but harder to get into. You don't need a minimum number of domains to join, just quality which meets their standards.
Domain Manager
The panel is familiar and easy to use. You have your domain lists and settings such as category, template, theme and keywords. However, I would have liked to see stat listings on this page.
Revenue Reports
There's no quick and dirty way to get revenue and stat reports. You have to generate reports each time you want to review them. They are also 24 hours behind. However, you can get the most recent revenue for the previous day as soon as you login.
Automatic Features
The templating system is awesome. You can have your domains automatically optimized which does a great job at choosing a template and set of keywords for you. Sometimes it's a tad off but nothing that can't be tweaked. If you don't want your keywords/templates automatically optimized, you can turn the feature off and tweak them yourself.
Be careful what keywords you select under the automatic optimizer. It's been rumored keywords can easily dissappear which makes sense if you want the program to always choose for you. I've been too parnoid to test this theory.
Template Managing
SmartName has just about every template under the sun (I mean, common. They even have a coffee layout!) and the best template management I've seen yet. You can customize everything from color scheme to slogan and then some. Here are some examples:
AtlantaDealerships.com
FloridaCoffeeShops.com
Keyword Customizing
The keywording feature is plentyful allowing up to 15 customizable keywords versus the normal 1. You can also customize the meta title, description, keywords and header/footer text.
Other Customizations
SmartName allows you to display whatever "For Sale" copy you want and whatever "For Sale" external URL of your liking.
Portfolio Bulk Management
The portfolio bulk manager is standard allowing you to choose what type of template, theme and sale status for all your domains at once. It also allows you to view combined review for the month.
Learning Curve
Because I previously used NameDrive, I found SmartName's learning curve to be small. It was just a matter of getting used to another system.
Support
I have needed support a few times to add domains that I purchased off other people that were still in someone else's account. Support responded promptly with inquiries answered in under 24 hours.
Company Mistakes Not buying SmartName(s).com which is currently owned by another entity and parked. I've accidently typed it into my browser several times even when setting the nameservers during my learning curve. Conclusion
The only complaint I have is with revenue reporting but it's a tiny tradeoff to the customization features SmartName allows versus other domain parking companies.
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