Dove® ran a Super Bowl ad and included the domain name DoveMenCare.com in it. This is not something new to include a domain name in an ad to continue the message online for the company at a site specific for the product being advertised. This is smart and often works very well to help continue to promote the product providing the end user with a lot more information. These sites often receive a great deal of traffic because of the domain name included in the ad but does it always work?

Since I do not own the domain name, there are a couple things that I can go by to tell if people are visiting the domain name directly or "searching" for the site on the web.

Alexa.com tracks how "busy" a site is for those who use the Alexa Toolbar and then each specific domain name get’s a number. This can be a pretty good guide to follow, even though not "everybody" has an Alexa toolbar. The lower the number, the more popular the site is. Since DoveMenCare.com is a stand alone site, this is a domain name that Alexa would provide a number for and as of today, DoveMenCare.com is 3,948,309. That is not good and is an indicator of lower amounts of traffic.

Another way to see if people are "searching" for the site, is Google.com’s suggest feature at the search engine. Google display’s popular searches people perform in a box below the main search box as you type in real time. Yes, even for newer domain name or newer search terms. Clearly there are a lot of ways to search for the specific site, but often times many people search for the product itself, Dove Men Care and often times they search for the URL (domain name) displayed in the ad itself. DoveMenCare.com was the domain used in the ad, but not enough people are searching for it, because Google is not displaying it in the suggest box at all.

Google is displaying two different ccTLD’s for .it and .be but nothing for the .com domain that was displayed in the ad for the Super Bowl. So far, things are not looking all that great for the domain displayed in the ad, because the Alexa rank is not all that great and it appears people are not searching for the site on Google! "Normally" there will be a lot of different search combination for the domain used but not for this specific ad that was run.

Was the domain confusing? They did display the domain in what I would not consider "user friendly". They included www. which not everybody does and secondly, the domain name was displayed in all capital letters. I think this makes the domain name hard to read, as all the keywords in the domain run together.

WWW.DOVEMENCARE.COM as shown above from a screen grab from the Super Bowl ad. It is always best to display a domain name with the first letter in each keyword capitalized, as it makes the words POP and easier to read. DoveMenCare.com is much easier to read than DOVEMENCARE.COM .

So since the domain was displayed with www. maybe people are searching that way for the domain name when looking for the site?

Nope, not the .com at least! This is pretty interesting to me because with nearly every ad that is run on TV, the domain name used in the ad will get a great deal of searches on Google. If a stand alone domain name is used in the ad, this also brings a good deal of traffic to the domain / site. I often see ad campaigns even with a newer domain name like DoveMenCare.com, quickly have an Alexa rank of xx,xxx or even lower! The lower the number the more traffic the site is getting!

From a web aspect, these findings are pretty interesting and clearly a lot of things can come into play. Was it the domain name used? Maybe people were simply not interested in the product? The ad turned them off and people were not paying attention when the domain was displayed? The product is more likely purchased in a local store, so that is why people are not searching for the specific site? It was hard to read the domain in the ad, which resulted in people not looking for it?

Again, there are clearly a lot of things that could be preventing people to look for or visit the site. Since the site is offering something that you can get at nearly every store locally, maybe the ad should of included a coupon to drive people to the site? Not a bad idea. Another thing that I think would of helped, is how the domain name was displayed in the ad. It was hard to read for me in all caps. Lastly, if you are spending the time and money to build a site for a specific ad campaign and want to drive traffic to the site built for it, showing the domain for a second at the very end of the commercial is not the best idea IMO. Display the domain name a couple times during the ad!

The commercial itself was pretty good (and funny) IMO, but the ad is to promote the product and including the domain name in the ad, is promoting the site as well. I am not so sure it was a total flop but doesn’t seem it performed all that great to grab the attention to those on the web to look for it and visit the site.