Marketing companies often use a "different" domain name in a commercial or print ad to track how effective an ad is. I always find it odd that many of these marketing companies add a "number" to a matching brand’s domain to track it’s campaign.

For me, as a customer, I always think of a domain with a number on it as "spammy" or not professional.

Last night I had seen a commercial for the brand Restasis® which is an eye drop product. In the commerical, the domain name used was Restasis1.com .

At first, I was like why the heck would a company "add" a 1 to their domain name when it was very likely they owned the domain without the "1".

So this morning I checked whois on Restasis.com and it is owned by the company of the brand Restasis® Allergan, Inc.

Restasis1.com is actually owned by the marketing company Beacon Healthcare Communications.

If you visit Restasis1.com it simply forwards to Restasis.com but displays a longer url (http://www.restasis.com/default.htm?x=Restasis1&CFID=308336&CFTOKEN=57132998) that allows the company to track how effective the TV ad is by keeping track of how many people visit the "unique" domain name used.

Now for the marketing company, I can understand why they want to show the "brand name" because it’s likely a good deal of people already know the brand name. It can get a bit long and or confusing to use a sub domain like http://drops.restasis.com or a url like http://www.restasis.com/drops .

The biggest problem I see with "adding a number" is you lose some of the "trust" from the customer and I think it’s a no no.

If you want to track an ad, I think it’s best to use a Call-To-Action domain name.

Beacon Healthcare Communications had done another ad for Allergan, Inc in the past and did what I would consider the right thing!

In that ad, the main focus was on Chronic Dry Eye. Beacon used the exact match call-to-action domain name ChronicDryEye.com . Now this time they simply made a mini-site for the ad which is fine, but the domain name could of easily used domain name forwarding just as Restasis1.com forwards to Restasis.com .

To me, it builds A Lot more trust into the customer using an Exact Match call-to-action domain that matches your main marketing message. Using the trusted .com domain that "makes sense" to the message you are getting across, makes a lot more sense to me then adding some number to a brand name or phrase.

Be sure to have at least a fair budget set aside for your domain name to use. This can run into a couple thousand dollars sometimes if you need to purchase it from a previous owner but having that Trust from your customer base is Priceless!

If you are interested in finding an owner of a domain name you are interested in purchasing, I suggest you use http://whois.domaintools.com . Simply type in the domain name you are interested in. The whois, is the database of domain name owners and should provide you with the best way to contact the current owner either via email or phone number.