A Portfolio Audit is an important step towards gaining control of your domain portfolio, and utilising it to the maximum level possible.
Most corporations with global outreach own hundreds, if not thousands of domain names. Even smaller organisations can have many domains, and some times more than they think! Over the years, domains may have been registered by multiple departments from multiple locations and branches, by several contact persons and domain registrars.
Based on your input and recommendations, our experienced auditors will run a series of automated screenings combined with manual research. They will eventually draw up a complete and user friendly overview of the portfolio, comprising not only all domain names held by or associated with your organisation, but also those held by third parties.
The audit will cover all generic Top Level Domains (gTLD’s) and country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD’s). A total of 600+ TLD’s.
Some countries and TLDs offer limited or no “whose” information, whereas others allow cross-data search and match. We know them all, and will seek to identify not only domains related to your core brand and products, but also campaign domains and other domain strings which we mutually agree to screen for.
Next step is to determine the current legal standing of the domains, i.e. does your organisation control its own domains.
Our statistics show that as much as 45% of domain names may be owned by third parties, including:
Knowing which registrars handle which domains, when they are set to expire, and what renewal agreement is in place is very important. Many registrars operate an opt-in policy, where domain renewal fees must be paid before a given deadline, or the domain will simply expire.
Track and determine the technical settings and effectiveness of each domain. Put inactive domains to good use.
Why were certain domains registered in the first place? Most domain names can be categorised easily, or clues can be found in the audit data, but some may be difficult to determine.
This is obviously a task where you may need to head up the research.
For most clients, the natural step forward following a thorough audit is to initiate a portfolio consolidation and optimisation.
