The return of analytics and the end of hotness

Analytics

Since late October, all of Brandpa’s seller analytics have been disabled. We’re pleased to announce a new analytics system is now in place.

This means we’re now recording data on your domains. You won’t see new figures in your dashboard until at least a week of data has been collected.

What’s new?

  • Brandpa records what domains are scrolled into view at any time. This allows us to measure time and attention paid to your domains, not just page views.
  • We track a tonne more: when your domains are shared, visitors clicking “buy now” but leaving, starting to type in an offer but leaving, etc.
  • We identify how often your domains are interacted with, relative to the attention they get. This includes “click-through rate” and much more.
  • We’re much better at ignoring bots, spammers, and scammers.
  • The new architecture allows our website to be much faster.

What happened to hotness?

Hotness was a problematic feature for several reasons:

  1. Some sellers would use bots or fake users to create the illusion that their domains were popular, making them appear ‘hot’.
  2. After we started punishing sellers who did this, some people started inflating the numbers of other sellers to get them banned.
  3. Despite our best efforts, the domains which ended up appearing as ‘hot’ were of increasingly questionable merit.

As a result we have now removed hotness completely from Brandpa.

Instead, powered by our new analytics system, sellers will soon have access to a range of private metrics, which will tell you more useful things about your individual domains.

Why did this take so long?

This took us a lot longer than we’d like – about 5 months.

Unfortunately the old analytics system was deeply embedded into Brandpa. And there was no way to ‘fix’ it – we had to redevelop it entirely, to handle the increasing traffic we were facing.

Brandpa uses custom analytics data to power our Brandbot valuation tool, fraud detection, domain rankings, sellers dashboards, our “What’s in demand” area and more. All of these needed to be updated to work with our new approach.

The good news is now that it’s done, we can expect future changes to our website to be much faster and easier.