Dave Thornton

I work for a retail company and we have a key product (sub-brand). We're currently debating the merits of having one URL and an extension to indicate the product e.g brand.com/product or a separate URL e.g. brandproduct.com

From a brand perspective we think it's probably better to go with the first option but there is concern that Internet users will just type in brand.com, forget to type in the '/product' bit and then struggle to find us from the main company homepage.

Does anybody have any factual evidence or personal opinion on user behaviour?

I've told my colleagues what a knowledgeable bunch Scoobynet users are - don't let me down guys (and girls)!

Iain Young

Why not have both, and make the brandproduct.com address point to the same place as brand.com/product. That way you are covered whatever, and domain names are cheap enough...

Dave Thornton

Thanks, yes we will definitely have both but we need to decide which one is used on our advertising etc.

Iain Young

Well, our company website is brand.com/product and it seems to work very well for us. It might depend on the type of thing you are selling though (we make / sell compilers, language tools etc, so a bit specialized)...

RichardS2005

Vanity urls are great for advertising, as long as the product is easy to spell e.g. qas.com/proweb

You can use them as the basis for a basic taxonomy for tracking marketing performance by using slightly different strings for different offline collateral - print advertising/above the line/below the line etc.

You can then cookie where they are used and carry this info through the customer journey so you don't need to ask 'where did you hear of us' etc as it can be pre-populated on the inbound contact email/order.

Always think of it from the customers point of view - what would they find easy to remember most of the time a vanity will make most sense!

Cheers

Rich

Dave Thornton

Thanks for the replies - didn't know it was called a vanity URL. Learn something every day!

SJ_Skyline

I used to do a fair bit of this but not for a few years now so sorry if I'm a little rusty

Another option you have is to use hostnames, like product.brand.com Like scoobynet does with bbs.scoobynet.com.

A while back I worked for a company that decided to register loads of domain names. It became a logistical nightmare when the renewals came round, with different names registered with different people some of who had moved on.

My preference has always been the brand.com/product approach. Brands are less likely to change than product names and from a techy perspective it's easier to maintain.

Hope that's useful