Sample Analysis · Marketing Optimization Across Countries
UK or Germany? Which market pays back a hosting campaign
Outside-in analysis of one stable, mid-sized European host.
All data is real ShareShift telemetry; prices are indicative to anonymize the target.
Markets compared
.uk vs .de
Data window
Sep 2025 to Sep 2026
Audience
Registrar, Hosting CEOs and CMOs
Short answer
Pick UK
A new order in UK is worth about €52 in top-line revenue over two years to this host, against about €12 in Germany. That is 4.2x the value from a market only 1.4x larger overall, and .uk quality is stable while .de is slipping.
On gross profit, the gap widens. Assuming a 25% margin on domains and 75% on shared hosting, the UK offers €31 against €6 per order over two years. Most marketing teams steer on top-line, so the rest of this page does too.
What this means for your company
While this sample analysis follows a single host, the methodology and reasoning can apply to any web services operator, regardless of market and size.
The simplest way to transfer knowledge here is to apply this three-step test on your own base. In ShareShift, steps 1 and 2 are pre-built for your own portfolio and benchmarked against every operator in your markets.
Weekly Share of New Domains
This tells you whether your rising unit count is a result of your own efforts, or a market-wide swell in demand.
And remember to clean the data before you trust a trend; one-off campaigns, data remapping and bulk orders all risk shaping a story that isn't really there.
90-day Quality
Consider the share of new domains with both a live site and functioning email.
Domains unused or deleted within 90 days of registration are highly likely to churn before the first renewal. In volatile markets, the 90-day activation volume is a better proxy for the quality of customers your campaign attracts.
CPA Ceiling
Set the max price per customer acquired for each market. Your ceiling is the value per new domain in year 1 and year 2, times your attach and survival rates.
When deploying marketing budget across multiple markets or campaigns, the option with the higher ceiling earns the allocation.
The situation
One host, two markets, one campaign
The host sells domains and shared hosting across Europe. Two markets carry about 7 in 10 of its recent new domains in our sample: .uk and .de. The others contribute, but each is too small to steer a marketing plan.
If its marketing team could run one campaign, which market should it pick? We looked at four things: the host's weekly share of new domains, market volume (about 35,000 new .uk and 25,000 new .de domains a week), cohort quality at 90 days, and indicative prices applied to those attach and churn rates.
Baselines
Two very different intake patterns
How do you know if a growing order volume is due to a successful marketing campaign, or a market-wide demand surge? Is a declining trend due to seasonality, or an aggressive competitor taking share?
To answer such questions, ShareShift reports weekly and monthly Acquisition Share by TLD for each provider. This is the share of newly discovered domain inventory mapped to that provider's name servers. If the share is growing, then the provider is winning - regardless of the absolute count of domains they added in any given week.
For this provider, the .UK Acquisition Share is consistently higher than .DE and moving in the opposite direction. While average Acquisition share grew from 5.2% to 7.2% from Q1 to Q3 in the UK, .de dropped from 3.8% to 1.7% in the same period. The April spike in .uk was later confirmed to be a data artefact, not a campaign push.
Should this host redouble marketing efforts in Germany, or bet all on the UK?
Data table
| Name | .uk | .de |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 26 | 4.4 | 3.7 |
| Feb 26 | 4.8 | 2.6 |
| Mar 26 | 6.39 | 5.1 |
| Apr 26 | 10.8 | 4.5 |
| May 26 | 5.9 | 1.7 |
| Jun 26 | 7.7 | 1.8 |
| Jul 26 | 7 | 2.1 |
| Aug 26 | 7.4 | 1.5 |
| Sep 26 | 7.1 | 1.6 |
Quality
Same host, very different customers
Fresh domain name registrations are a poor proxy for long-term profitability. Too much fraud and casual registrations with no legitimate business intent.
Instead, 7-day and 90-day liveness tests gauge the quality of new intake. Hosts will recognize the pattern: an empty, unused domain at 90 days is very likely a non-renewal. Assuming this host runs identical buying and onboarding journeys in all markets, any differences in intake quality would indicate genuine differences in customer quality.
The contrast is stark: only 1 in 9 new .de domains is running a live website and a functioning mailbox after 3 months. Cf. 6 out of 10 .uk domains. The share of dead and dormant domains is also materially higher in Germany than in the UK.
| UK (.uk) | Germany (.de) | |
|---|---|---|
| Live site plus email | 59% | 11% |
| Dead, Q1 to Q2 cohorts | 18% to 17% | 23% to 37% |
| Domains analysed | about 55,000 | about 15,000 |
Quality Analysis, done right
Hosts often drive service adoption through bundling and free trial periods. While proven useful for increasing attach rates, such tactics can distort underlying customer intent. If a free mailbox was added to cart automatically, without customer's explicit consent, can they be tracked as a Mail Hosting buyer? If a site builder license is included into the hosting plan, does the customer count as a SaaS product user, regardless of how they built the site?
To avoid such noise in the data, quality analysis must follow actual usage, not billing records. ShareShift tracks services actually deployed on a domain, not bundled or sold to the customer that has not activated. Additionally, services are mapped to vendors so the operator knows how fragmented their customers' tech stack truly is.
Value
What a new customer is worth
Once volume and quality of intake are established, the marketing manager or CMO can calculate the campaign ROI. These factors usually play a part:
- Hosting attach rate. Of all domain orders, what's the share of live websites?
- Hosting capture rate. Of all live websites, what's the share hosted by this operator, vs a competitor? Holding domains for other hosts is a valid strategy, even if the margin is thinner.
- Attrition rate. What's the share of domains in prior cohorts that churned or switched to a competitor?
- 1st and 2nd year ARPU: average revenue per user for domain- and web-hosting orders, weighted based on attach rates.
ShareShift can supply data on every line except pricing. In a real scenario, the hosting operator can improve accuracy of the ROI calculation by matching domains to specific hosting plans and prices from their CRM.
| UK (.uk) | Germany (.de) | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting attach | 40% | 7.5% |
| Hosting capture | 68% | 21% |
| First-year domain loss | 27% | 38% |
| Domain only, two-year | €17 | €10 |
| With hosting, two-year | €102 | €86 |
| Two-year blended | €51.2 | €12.1 |
Budget
What a team can afford to pay
The most a campaign can pay for a domain is the revenue it earns by the payback date. These ceilings are top-line: if you steer on profit, multiply by your margin.
| UK (.uk) | Germany (.de) | |
|---|---|---|
| Year-1 break-even blended CPA | up to €16 | up to €7 |
| Two-year break-even blended CPA | up to €52 | up to €12 |
| Budget per 1,000 new domains, year 1 / two-year | €16k / €52k | €7k / €12k |
| Domains from +1 share point, 12 months | about 18,000 | about 13,000 |
Note: these are blended CPA values, meaning the overall marketing cost divided by the total count of orders. The direct CPA for a specific channel or campaign is typically higher. How high depends on the volume of zero-cost orders attracted through referrals, SEO, etc.
A note on the metrics
Why not LTV:CAC or IRR directly?
The cleanest way to compare two markets is customer lifetime value (CLTV) against cost of acquisition (CAC), discounted back to a rate of return (IRR). We didn't calculate either, and here is why.
A market with a short operating history or a small installed base hasn't accumulated enough renewal cycles yet for a real, mature LTV to exist. For such situations, two-year blended revenue and 90-day quality are two viable proxy indicators for the same decision. Once a market has two or three renewal cycles of history behind it, the same underlying data supports a full LTV:CAC and IRR view instead.
What this unlocks
The Call
On unit economics, UK wins: higher value per domain, higher quality, and a market large enough that one extra share point is worth about 18,000 domains a year.
That's not the whole picture, though. A host might have real strategic reasons to keep investing in Germany that wouldn't show up in acquisition or quality data at all: a partnership taking shape, share being defended against a specific competitor, or a hosting product still maturing in that market. This analysis can't see any of that, so it's an input to the budget conversation, not a replacement for it.
On the numbers we have: put the next campaign in .uk. Treat .de as an activation problem before an acquisition one, since it only competes on unit economics if the cost per domain falls to under a third of the UK figure, or activation moves well past its current 11%.
4.2x difference in two-year revenue per domain, .uk vs .de
€52 vs €12
New domains with a live site plus email at 3 months, .uk vs .de
59% vs 11%
New domains empty or deleted at 3 months, .uk vs .de
17% vs 28%
Run this test on your own portfolio
See your share of new domains, your 90-day quality and your CPA ceiling by market, benchmarked against every operator in your markets.
Appendix
Methodology & scope.
This report draws on ShareShift's core telemetry and scoring pipeline. Full detail on data sourcing, scope, attribution rules, and detectability limits lives at shareshift.io/methodology.
Exclusions: In this report, we dropped 3 weeks in .uk and 9 in .de. They were ingestion events, including one where the .de zone grew by about 3 million domains through coverage improvement.
Revenue assumptions: This sample analysis relies on indicative pricing in line with what many European hosts charge: a €6 first-year domain, then a €15 renewal in .uk and €7 in .de; shared hosting at €2 a month in year 1, then €7.
Variation in churn rates: Since mid-July the host also routes many expiring domains to bulk parking and marketplaces. Structural churn fell about 80% while migrations out nearly doubled, and total exits stayed flat. For simplicity, the analysis assumed a stable loss rate regardless of their destination.
Limits
What this analysis cannot tell you
Attach is a ceiling: placeholder pages can count as presence, so hosting attach may be overstated. Figures are top-line revenue, and margins vary widely: cloud-based hosting plans carry far lower margin than shared hosting.
New Inventory data was pulled on Sep 25, while quality cohorts end on 29 June for the 90-day liveness test. The summer pullback in .de is not yet visible in quality data.
FAQ
Common questions
Which market should a host run a campaign in?
The one with the highest value per new domain and the steadiest quality, not the one with the most headroom. Here that is .uk.
How much can I pay for a domain ad campaign?
No more than the revenue it will earn by your payback date, multiplied by your margin if you steer on profit.
How reliable is 90-day dead as a churn proxy?
Close for empty domains, so we add 10 points for live sites that also leave.
Can I run this on my own base?
Yes. Your weekly share of new domains and your 90-day quality, by market, are the two inputs, and ShareShift dashboards provide both.