Full visibility into your brand’s online presence is vital for protecting and enhancing your strategic domain portfolio. Markmonitor Portfolio Insights, powered by Dataprovider.com, offers real-time insights through a custom crawl for better control over your brand’s digital footprint. View a demo of this powerful solution in this recorded webinar.
Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Webinar Transcript – Introducing Markmonitor Portfolio Insights: Comprehensive Data Monitoring for Actionable Insights
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer, Head of Partnerships, Markmonitor
This webinar is an exciting one with a partner of ours called Dataprovider.com.
Dataprovider.com is located in the Netherlands, and we’re lucky enough today to have one of its co-founders, Christian Branbergen, from their group, with us. So, thank you, Christian, for joining us today.
Speaking: Christian Branbergen, Co-founder of Dataprovider.com
Hello to you. No problem.
Markmonitor Portfolio Insights Webinar Introduction
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Hello to you, too.
I’m going to show a couple of introductory slides. Then we’ll get into the more interesting part of the presentation: publicity around our new Markmonitor Portfolio Insights solution. So with that, I just want to highlight that it’s a new comprehensive data monitoring tool, subscription, data set, infographic, call it what you will — it’s multipurpose in nature. And so, Christian’s kind enough to join us today, and we’ll walk through some of those highlights. Hopefully, there’s something for each constituency. Obviously, domain management touches a lot of different groups within the enterprise. It can be IP legal; it can be information technology, it can be network security, it can be compliance, or governance.
And so what we’d like you to leave this webinar with today is knowledge of the fact that there are some insights available to each of your groups within your enterprise that may have some new data or a new way to analyze that data. Without further ado, I’ll introduce Christian. As I said, Dataprovider.com has been our partner since 2018. Christian is one of the co-founders, and Dataprovider.com goes back to 2008, so they’ve been around for 16 years. I don’t know when the exact birthday is, Christian, but if it’s past, happy birthday. If it’s ahead, happy birthday. 16 years is impressive.
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
Thank you.
History of Dataprovider.com and Markmonitor Portfolio Insights
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
As I said, we’ve turbocharged this partner relationship this year, in 2024, with Dataprovider.com’s help, right? They’re wizards in the area of data collection and data synthesis. And so, we’ve launched the Markmonitor Portfolio Insights offering this year, and we already have multiple client subscriptions. So, thank you to those early client subscribers. We hope there are many more of you ahead, and we hope this presentation is a compelling reason for you to ask for a demonstration or to learn more about this solution.
Christian, maybe a little bit about your background, if you don’t mind? About you personally or about Dataprovider.com, as you prefer.
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
I think it’s best, of course, to talk about Dataprovider.com for a while. We are a search engine, and we’ve been around for, like you just said, almost 16 years. This is our 15th year. We index the internet and make a very structured summary of it. And that’s also part of what we’re going to show in a minute.
Dataprovider.com is based in the Netherlands, in a city called Groningen, which is in the northern Netherlands. We have 45 employees. I think those are the most important things to know.
Markmonitor Portofolio Insights Webinar Agenda
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Excellent. Well, let’s cut to the chase. Christian is going to walk you through a couple of different neat things here.
I want to give a visual representation to set the agenda. Again, it’s a subscription-based service from Markmonitor backed by our partner here. We log in to our partner’s area. They house and host it. And you’ll see, kind of like a financial analysis tool, basically, this is dynamic data, right? It changes. The portfolio is going to change for each of our customers. And so, we want to chart some of those changes and highlight some things — like, maybe you had a short-term project, and you finished that project, and you want to see the benefits and tout the benefits of that project. So, Christian will show you a month-over-month view, right? We crawl the private data of each of your portfolios, and we represent that data here. So, let’s just cut to the chase, Christian, and have you show the demonstration dashboard that we created. It does not contain any existing client data. We used a color palette for examples, so red.com, blue.net, and green.org were used in this sample size to show you.
Christian, I’ll turn it over to you, and you can highlight some of the dashboards, and maybe in between each big tile, I’ll interject a couple of things — what we’ve heard positively or constructively from our clients along the way.
Demo of Markmonitor Portfolio Insights and Data Dashboards
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
Okay. That sounds like a plan. Let me share my screen.
This is the dashboard where you would normally land. Of course, this is a demo dashboard, so the numbers that you see are all from the demo domains. And each tile that you see represents a lot of information. So what you can do is you can actually zoom in on the tile. That is what we’re going to start with right away, and we’re going to start with an easy tile, which is the top-level domain tile. If you click on the plus sign, you zoom into that specific tile to see all the details.
This gives you a nice breakdown of all the different TLDs in your zone. As Ed already mentioned, we index all the domains in your portfolio and collect over 200 different variables from them. We use these tiles to give you breakdowns of this information. This one is about the TLDs.
In this demo account, there were slightly over a thousand legacy gTLDs, and 1,300 of them were ccTLDs. So, it gives you the breakdowns of your portfolio. Also, if you have domains that are IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names), you can also see them here. This is the easiest dashboard to start with.
Ed, is there something that you want to add to this section?
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Yes. I find fear is a bloated portfolio. And so this is a great way to conduct a census about your inventory and start to see, do we have a policy that says we don’t need .pro domains or .biz domains or, you know, a certain country code where you’re no longer doing business, for example.
Now, defensively, there are all sorts of good reasons to protect those brands, depending on the type of domain strings involved. Exactly what Christian said is this is a launching point to start to see what your inventory looks like, the composite kind of form, whether it’s gTLD or country code top-level domains, and then say if, and when, you feel some budgetary pressure, or you need to examine which brands have been sunsetted in your trademark portfolio, this is a nice way to kind of segue into that. Start with basic data and then use that data to do short or medium-term projects that can make your portfolio healthier over time.
What Information Does Markmonitor Portfolio Insights Crawl?
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
We crawl all the domains in here, of course. We started out with this little top-level domain tile, but when a crawler actually goes to those domains, something is going to happen. And that is what you see in the response tile.
There are four different possibilities. One of them is “Host Not Found.” This means there is a domain name, but there is no IP address configured. There are no A records. So nothing really happens. There’s just nothing there. It’s a host not found. Then, there is the response of “It’s Available,” meaning that there’s not only a domain name but also a website connected to it. It can also be a parking or placeholder, but something is there. Or it can be an “Access Denied.” That’s the third one that we have. Access denied can be when you have a website that is still in development and you have a robot.txt, which says, “do not allow,” so that we don’t index it. It can also be that it’s password protected, like if you have an intranet or a website where people have to enter a password to get into the website, that is what an access denial is. And the fourth one is the “Redirect,” meaning, like, in the example here, if you go to blue.com, it redirects to yellow.com, which is a totally different domain; of course, that is what we consider a redirect. Now, we can also zoom in on the tile. And then again, you have your host not found, available, and access denied.
It is very important to know of your zone, of course, what is happening in there. Now, when something is “access denied,” when we cannot go in — I already explained a little bit about it, so it can be because of mobile.txt, but it can also be because there is an issue with the website or with the server. And that is what you see in these tiles. Like, if it’s a 4XX, let’s say something in the status code 400 series, it means there is something wrong with the website. Maybe it’s a page not found or it’s a forbidden page. If it’s something in the 500 series, that is where the web server itself has issues. And if it’s something that starts with a nine, it’s all about the indexation process. For example, we cannot index a site because it is disallowed by robots, because there is a password, or there can be many reasons.
The nice thing about these dashboards is that if you upload your zone file and we index the domains, and you think, okay, all the websites here work, but then you see, oh, apparently 138 domains result in something like a 404; you can then click on the view data button. And what happens is that we will open the sheet. This is what we call the sheet. We will show you all the websites that resulted in that specific status code in that specific range so you can actually see the websites’ results and where those results occurred.
Now, if a website is available, so there’s something there, and it works, then we also classify the type of website. Is it a business website? Is it a content website? Is it a placeholder? Or is it more like a personal website? We look at the content, we look at the pages on the website, and we classify what type of website it is. So that is only when a website is available. If something redirects, we also know where it redirects to. Like many of the domains in this demo portfolio redirect to dan.com, which is parking, right, Ed?
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Yes, brokerage and parking for sites, assets for sale, exactly. So, these domains are probably redirected there because they are for sale, for example.
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
You can actually see where they redirect. We also know which domains are active, meaning that they have made lots of changes over the month. Every month, we go to the websites again, and we can compare all the changes. For example, if you add more pages, change your address, or upgrade your CMS to a new version, that all increases the activity seen in the dashboard and in the tiles.
We also show you which websites are active and which ones are less active, if they are available. These are great insights into how your domain portfolio is being used. But let me pause there for a quick second. Maybe you want to add something, Ed?
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Yes, just two quick correlators. On the left side, as Christian showed you, we’ve heard from our customers that sometimes it’s intentional, right? These errors are on the server website or the block, sensitive information, or whatever it may be. But sometimes, they’re just configuration things that need some quick attention from someone on the team. So, again, finding that data, looking at the details of that data easily, and remembering which filter got you to that data has proven very helpful based on our clients’ responses so far, that they can easily find and easily remedy whatever they’ve needed.
On the right-hand side, I think it gets very interesting. Many of our Markmonitor domains are forwarding. Sometimes, it’s interesting to get high activity changes. For example, someone may put a new copyright tag on the bottom of each page. And so there’s a compliance check to say, did we input our copyright notice or a legal notice on the bottom of each of our pages?
You can use some of these tools to track each site’s changes to help you with checking those things, right? Of course, you could do this manually. Who wants to do that, and who has the time and priority to do that? So we’re big believers in letting data provider crawlers do this stuff month over month so you can check things for compliance over time.
SSL Certs: Status and Other Actionable Information
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
So when we know everything about responses, like what is happening on those domains, we also take other things into account. For example, you can’t really see it, but most websites these days, of course, have SSL certificates in them. So the tile at the top right tells everything there is to know about SSL search.
Again, if you click on the plus for more details, we zoom in on this specific area that explains a lot about the SSL search in your zone. So while we index a website and check the SSL search, we also authenticate. So we look at what you see at the bottom left to see if the installed SSL search is there and if it’s working. And believe it or not, in many cases, or too many cases, let me put it in those words, SSL certs don’t always work. It can be because they are expired or configured incorrectly. There are many reasons that can happen, but here in this part, we show you exactly the domains that have valid and invalid or sometimes no SSL certificates.
It also gives you a breakdown of all the different certificate types available. Is it an SSL certificate for just a single domain or a multidomain, like one certificate that works on multiple domains? Is it a wildcard SSL certificate that works on all the subdomains of a specific domain? This gives you a little bit of detail about the types of certificates.
One very fun thing to always see is that if it was invalid, then we also know which hostnames have the invalid certificates there. This screen also gives you a breakdown of the different SSL issuer organizations. This is very helpful, for example, when you only want to use certain brands, say if you only want to have Sectigo, DigiCert, or Google. Here you can see exactly what type of SSL certs are being used in your zone. You can use the DNS CAA records, by the way, to explain what SSL issuer organizations you want to use. And that is what you see here on the right.
Now, SSL Certs always have an expiration date. So, on this screen, we will also show you the number of domains with SSL Certs that will expire within the next 30 days. This gives you a little bit of an alert on the domains where something is going to happen. Now, as you can see, this contains a lot of information about SSL. We tried to limit it to all the relevant information, and I think that most people have access to all the relevant information here. What do you think, Ed?
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Yes, for example, you brought up a great highlight discussing the issuer organization tile toward the middle. Some companies have a policy of prohibition on a certain brand or client, and we obviously respect whatever their certificate authority rules are. We don’t set those rules, but it’s nice to know very quickly — at the tip of a finger, they can see an inventory of issuer certificates that may not align with their policy, and they can identify the underlying domains associated with those. They can remedy, correct, change their opinion, change their policy, or whatever the outcome is. They can use this type of data to move and pivot on that.
And that’s what we want, right? As I mentioned at the top of the call, we want something for every constituency. So, whether it’s expired certs, expiring certs are certainly at the forefront of people’s minds nowadays. There’s a push underway to make the certificate validity period even shorter than it is today. So expiring certs is going to come up quite a few times in the next 12 to 24 months. Using a tile set like this, these infographics can again be those points on a map, waypoints, if you will, to help you get there, to get back in the direction that you want to go.
Website Responses and SEO Factors
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
We talked about the TLDs, the responses, and what is happening on the domains regarding SSL Certificates. Another thing that is always very interesting to see is if there is a working website with, for example, a working SSL cert, then in many cases, there is also a CMS or a shopping cart or something related to SEO — there is actual content. So, in the tile about CMS and SEO, we try to give you some information about how the content is created and optimized for search engines. It shows you a breakdown of the different shopping cart systems that we identified. The crawler identifies over 200 different shopping cart systems and over 300 different CMSs.
We show you what kind of CMSs are being used and what kind of shopping carts, but of course, there are also people who still make websites in Notepad with their bare hands. However, one of these popular CMSs will be detected in most cases. Now, once you have a website, there are also, in many cases, low-hanging fruits to optimize a website. Even in this little demo, there were multiple cases with easy quick fixes for your SEO. Apparently, there are 21 websites in this dataset that don’t have appropriate titles. There’s just no title configured. And for SEO, it is very important to have a title and a description. Every page of your website should have a clear title and a clear description. Apparently, in this data set, 59 websites don’t have a description. They’re just empty. So this is low-hanging fruit for your marketing department to optimize these websites to rank better and get more people to those websites.
Another part of SEO is, do you have a mobile version of your website? So, does your website work on mobile? And in this case, most websites, by the way, are optimized for mobile. You can see the different languages that are being offered. Also, check if there is a sitemap available for that website. And now, most websites, like 797, have an actual working website, not a placeholder, not parking. There are real websites, and 494 of them also have a site map. This makes it easier for the Google bot, for example, to index the website. So, in brief, if a website uses a CMS or shopping cart, here you get the breakdowns of how they are created. You can also see what is the low-hanging fruit to optimize the websites.
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
Yeah, and this is a great tie-in, like you said, to the marketing groups of the digital operations teams. They might think that they have everything configured maximally, and this is a quick and easy way to do it. And have no fear: if any of these terms are unfamiliar to you, Dataprovider.com has built a data dictionary on the left-hand navigation menu. Maybe Christian will hover over it, but for anything that’s an acronym or something that you’re not familiar with, there’s a wonderful data dictionary that can reference just like an almanac. It includes any term used in this system. And so there’s a lot of detailed information that we won’t show you in this short webinar today, but rest assured that we want to supply those subscribing customers with all the support materials to make this work in an optimized way.
So, Christian, we’re coming up on time. I think maybe we show one or two more tiles. Sometimes, a security audience might be interested in Markmonitor Portfolio Insights, and maybe we’ll highlight a few of those tiles.
Website and Domain Security Insights
Speaking: Christian Branbergen
Absolutely. Let’s do the security tile; that is always very interesting.
The security tile highlights a few important security features. As I said before, in the back end, we have over 200 different fields that you can access through what we call the private crawl, which you also have access to through this account. For example, we do database or port scanning on all the websites.
If you have websites in your zone with open database ports to the public, they will also be listed here. So it’s very important to close those ports if you have, for example, cookie compliance software, which many websites these days have because we ask for usernames, passwords, and phone numbers; we store a lot of stuff in cookies. These days, you have to have something like a cookie compliance framework. We check if these are there. And now, where it becomes very interesting—I always find this very interesting — is when you have things with PII (personally identifiable information), like I just said, usernames, passwords, email addresses, things like that.
There are still websites out there, even in this demo dataset, like seven domains. They collect PII, so usernames and passwords, and they don’t have SSL. If you go to these websites and enter your username and password or anything else, it is being sent over the internet unencrypted. This means that everything that is also loaded in the background, ranging from Google Analytics to Hotjar, doesn’t matter — all those scripts also see exactly what you typed in and just post it to that website. So it’s very important that you have that number run back to zero. Also, we do things like check if you use WordPress, which is, of course, a very popular CMS, and check to see if you have the right version. Check to see if your CMS is not deprecated or so old that they’re not being maintained. In this example, we have 34 domains running on old versions of WordPress. And we check the version of the web server software, like, do you have the right version of Apache or nGenX? We check also for deprecated versions of PHP and all the HTP headers that are on these websites. We have them in the backend. You can access them, and this that you see in the demo is just the tip of the iceberg ofwhat you can do with the security data.
Markmonitor Portfolio Insights Webinar Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Speaking: Ed Schandlbauer
It’s great. We’ve exposed some vulnerabilities, but I just want everybody in the audience to remember there’s a lot of positivity in here, right? We want to give you data in infographic form with supporting filters and exportable data that can show how you’re running your program. You might need that for an annual performance review or to justify next year’s budget or more headcount. We want to show you both positive and negative things. There are some short-term fixes that might be exposed, like a deprecated site or expiring cert or something along those lines, but there’s also a ton of positive stuff that we can help you relay, maybe even highlight.
That’s why we appropriately named it “Portfolio Insights,” right? It need not always be doom and gloom. There’s a lot of stuff that we can tout and help you justify your program, expand your program, or explain your program even better sometimes because, Lord knows, many people don’t know what domain management is all about.
These different tiles are visually delightful, but there’s also real meat behind them in terms of the data. And you don’t have to remember the filters. All of these are kind of pre-baked and easily exportable. So I’m glad, Christian, you took the time to show off a couple of those tiles today.
If any of our customers like what they saw today and want a demo, we’re happy to do that for you. Just please get in touch with your account manager. With that, we’ll give you back the rest of your day. We’re very appreciative of you all joining us today. So again, Christian, thank you. I appreciate you joining us today, and we’re glad we’ve been partnered with you for six years. I hope there’s another decade ahead of good collaboration.
