Domain Redirect Buying, Bought on Domain History

Domain redirect traffic is bought on what a domain used to be, not on the category label the network prints beside it. A domain that ran a real forum for six years and then lapsed sends people who arrived on purpose. A freshly registered string matching your keywords sends people who mistyped something else. We buy at the domain level, we require the source domain in the postback, and we will not spend on inventory that reports only at network or category level, which rules out a meaningful share of what gets offered. What we look at before money moves: The domain's history. What it hosted, when it lapsed, what it ranked for, and whether the traffic curve since parking looks like decaying direct navigation or like something being pointed at it. Volume that is flat by hour of day across a full week is not type-in traffic. We also look at the referrer situation honestly: a DNS-level redirect passes no referrer, so measurement depends entirely on a source token in the destination URL and a network that populates it consistently. We test that first, on a small budget, across a handful of domains. Networks fail that test often enough that it is the first thing we do. Trademark exposure is the buyer's problem, not the network's: We will not buy on domains that are typographic variants of a live trademark, yours or anybody else's. The network carries no risk in that inventory and the advertiser carries all of it, up to a UDRP filing that names the campaign. Excluding it removes a sizeable and cheap part of the available pool, and it is the main reason our redirect buys cost more per visit than the quotes clients arrive holding. Japan: This channel is small for Japanese targeting and we prefer to say so up front. Registering a .jp domain requires a Japanese address, which keeps the speculative parking market thin compared with .com, and the parked inventory that does exist is mostly English-language. For a Japanese brand, redirect buying is worth running against expatriate and inbound-travel intent in US and UK inventory, and is usually not worth running domestically. We have talked more clients out of this channel for Japan than we have built it for. What we refuse: No adult- or gambling-history domains behind sports and fitness brands, however the traffic performs; the association surfaces in brand search within a quarter. No pharmaceutical or medical device destinations on redirect inventory. No buying against a competitor's brand name. No engagement where the destination is a page we have not been allowed to instrument. Who this is not for: Advertisers who need volume on a schedule. Qualified redirect inventory is finite, and the good domains are already known to the people buying them, so this channel funds a tested offer rather than launching one. Teams whose attribution treats a no-referrer visit as direct traffic, because they will never see what this bought and will conclude it did nothing. What arrives: The domain list with the history, the reason to buy and the ceiling on each. The tracking setup with the source-token path tested against live traffic before any scaling. The exclusion list with trademark and category reasons written down, so it survives the account manager who inherits it. A close-out read comparing each domain's cost per qualified visit against its first-week estimate, marking which to renew and which to drop.