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Major industry events, like the 2022 NamesCon
Global conference in Austin, Texas, have always
featured evening social events that give companies an opportunity to
connect with loyal customers and thank them for support. For new
companies looking to make a big splash, these shows that
bring domain pros from around the world together in one place
also provide an ideal location to stage a launch.
A new company called Giant
Panda (GP) took full advantage of that opportunity in Austin
where attendees were eager to learn what this new service would be
bringing to the table. The curiosity level was especially high because
GP's CEO and majority owner is serial entrepreneur Rick Latona,
an industry veteran who has been successfully tilling the domain fields
for over 20 years now. However, the thing that really pegged the
needle on the curiosity meter was hearing that Giant Panda is a domain
monetization company.
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Giant
Panda leaders (left to right): CRO Paul Dinin, CTO Ryan
Steel and CEO Rick Latona
at the Giant Panda Launch Party during NamesCon Global in Austin,
Texas Sept. 1, 2022.
My first thought was "wait a minute, a
new parking company is entering the business after around 20
others have disappeared since the mid 2000s pinnacle of PPC?"
That turned out to be NO, not a new parking company. While domain
monetization and parking are often thought of as the same thing, Giant
Panda is a different animal - a middleware service provider that
performs what appears to be keyword optimization magic for domain
portfolio owners before their traffic is delivered to one of
Giant Panda's two parking company partners, Smartname
or Parking Crew.
Latona said GP's clients have seen a big enough uptick in earnings to
cover GP's 15% of revenue fee and still walk away with considerably
higher payouts than they had before.
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Since the Giant Panda crew was busy
entertaining their guests at NamesCon Global, we agreed to get
on a call after the conference so I could get an inside look at
what GP has conjured up. Rather than magic it turned out to be data
driven science and along with the biggest differentiator of
all - human interaction, a combination that is producing
the kind of results Latona and team members have been working on
for nearly eight years now. At a time when it was common
practice for domain owners to continually move their portfolios
from one provider to another in search of higher returns, Latona
said he had an epiphany. What if you could achieve the
same goal by changing the PPC keywords rather changing
providers? The result is what you see today at GiantPanda.com.
Notice I did not say the end result, because Latona said
the GP team continues to work every day to improve the product
in search of the perfect landing page - an
animal akin to a unicorn in that no one has seen one yet.
I got my first
close up look at the system when I joined Rick and Chief Revenue
Officer Paul Dinin on a video call a couple of weeks
after NamesCon. As most of their system is proprietary work they
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Giant
Panda CEO Rick Latona |
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to protect, I agreed
not to take screenshots as they guided me through the
presentation, nor identify client names (though I can tell you
that even before their big reveal at NamesCon GP had already
been working with a number of major investors whose names would
be immediately recognizable to anyone who has been in this
business for any length of time). |
My first impression in seeing the data
filled screens was that they looked like something you might expect
to see in a space launch at NASA. No bit of information about the
domain's traffic and results from keyword changes that had been made was
missing. The primary goal at GP is to discover the real intent of
the visitor. While Latona allowed that Google's automated process
for doing that is good, there was room for improvement that only human
interaction could provide. A word can have many different meanings
depending on the context in which it used. For example, GP was
given a one-word domain with "Benefit" as the word. Google
automatically provided links to employee benefit services.
However GP research discovered more visitors were looking for
consumer benefits, especially discounted residential internet
services and financial help. So they changed the keywords for the lander
and saw a huge jump in revenue for that domain. Rick and Paul showed we
many more of these startling "before and after" revenue
boosting cases for specific keyword domains.
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Image from Bigstock |
Of course, the need for human
evaluation to make their system work makes one wonder about
the scalability of the GP model, especially for a company
that is determined to serve clients worldwide. To tackle
that problem, Giant Panda, who has teams of optimizers in
countries around the globe, has put an emphasis on hiring people
who have mastery of languages beyond English in order to spot
critical nuances in what words mean in local markets
around the world. GP now covers French, German, Spanish,
Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Hebrew and many more. In fact,
Latona said today the company rarely adds anyone unless they are
fluent in a language they do not already have covered.
This has also allowed the company to identify and effectively monetize
foreign language traffic to domains. Once these unique
traits of keywords are identified they become part of the GP
record and can be used again. |
CRO Paul Dinin noted that Giant
Panda has also benefited from having a very low attrition rate in their
global workforce. He said the jobs GP needed to have done were positions
that didn't even exist before Giant Panda pinpointed their need for
them. Since the task of optimizing a domain is much like solving one
puzzle after another, Dinin said GP looked for people who were adept
at solving problems. Those hired went through a six-month training
program and are paid very well to protect Giant Panda's investment in
them.
All of those bodies
are needed because Latona said GP typically reviews thousands of
the their highest value client assets at least once a month
to check performance and see if data they have collected over
the previous 30 days revealed further keyword tweaks they could
make to insure the best results possible. One reason that is so
important is that a lot of intent changes with the season.
For example, in the floral category the specific variety of
flowers being looked for changes for different holidays and
events over the course of the year. Latona refers to this never
ending hunt for intent at an exact point in time as an
obsession with "using every part of the animal" to
boost income.
Anyone who has
domains with organic traffic can apply
for a Giant Panda account (GP does not do
arbitration). Keep in mind that GP can't create traffic that
isn't there but the company is confident they
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can improve the
results for domains that draw visitors. For those wondering
about selling domains handled by Giant Panda, yes, your
landers can display For Sale notices and no commission is
charged if you sell a name. |
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