subject: com Is Critical For Radio Advertising [print this page] Owning a .com website address (URL) is not an option, it's a necessity. Leave the .net, .org, .name, .tv and all the other dot suffixes for someone else. In a recent radio marketing campaign, the importance of a .com URL became very apparent.
Here's the story. I own iClickAcademy.com and I own iClickAcademy.ca. Recently, I decided to try radio advertising for the Canadian website (.ca), but not the international one (.com).
The radio ad was written and produced by the radio station in my test market and ran for three weeks. At the end of the campaign, the statistics were shocking. The .ca website had received 45 hits and the.com site had received 47.
If we look at the results and ignore the fact that the radio campaign was a flop, you'll notice that the .com site got more hits than the .ca site, even though the .com site was not being advertised.
Why?
When people hear a domain name on the radio, they have to write it down or remember it. Either way, half the people get it wrong and assume they heard .com. This was a frightening statistic that I hadn't considered when I started the advertising campaign, but a very good lesson in offline advertising and psychology.
In short, if you own a domain that's not a .com and you're promoting on the radio, in newspapers, or any other type of offline advertising you're sending the .com domain owner lots of free traffic. That's great for the other guynot good for you.
