Direct Navigation Conversion Rates
Russ Horowitz over at Marchex has been a big proponent of direct navigation sites (the company owns hundreds of thousands of domains). He has argued that the space is a subset of search and the intent of a user is similar but interesting data from Efficient Frontier seems to point otherwise:
Yahoo is most levered to the domaining industry and the quality of the traffic suggests it does not convert as well as search. Even with Google, the partners outside of AOL and ASK (AOL btw, converts at a huge premium to other search engines) don’t seem to be driving that many conversions for the four sample advertisers Efficient Frontier ran the analysis on.
