Verified Traffic - Good or Bad?

[Clinton]

Flippa's got a new blog post about verified traffic from your GA account.

Is this a good thing or bad thing?

I can't help feeling some people must derive reassurance from that term and/or believe, even sub-consciously, that the traffic in these reports is genuine. In fact, Flippa's terminology in this blog post is "An easier way to provide verified traffic stats". It could be interpreted as the traffic having been verified. Of course, it's only a verification of what Google Analytics has ... which could be tons and tons of fake traffic!

Does the average buyer understand that?

What does verified traffic stats mean to YOU?

[tke71709]

Does the average buyer understand that?

Probably not, but then again I would assume that the average buyer thinks that GA is to be taken as gospel.

What does verified traffic stats mean to YOU?

Tough call on this one, to me it would mean at it's simplest is that the numbers reported by the service have not been altered in any way. Whether the numbers themselves are correct is another question altogether.

The comments show that Flippa's commitment to churning out quality product is no better than ever.

I just tried to use this and it’s showing Page Views Per Month in the place Uniques Per Month. So instead of having 7k uniques, it is showing 7k views and instead of 12k views, it is showing 12k uniques.

Do they not test anything before they release it?

[DomainMagnate]

I see how it can be confusing, but I think it's ok in this case as the verified part clearly refers to the traffic numbers from the GA stats, not the sources of the traffic or its quality. It's also good in a sense that it's better than just letting people type random figures. Might be useful to add something about the traffic sources from the verified GA also, like what % is from search engines, direct etc.

[Andrew]

Verified Traffic is obviously bad.

Website buyers LOVE spending an hour or so doing preliminary due diligence on a listing, then convincing the seller to give them access to their analytics/stats account only to discover that the claimed traffic by no means matches top level reported traffic. Verified traffic means this is less likely to happen which is bad for everyone. Sellers should be forced to add their own stats manually and buyers should be forced to verify these summary numbers themselves. It's an abomination!

[Clinton]

(getting) access to their analytics/stats account only to discover that the claimed traffic by no means matches top level reported traffic...

Is this a big problem, Andrew? Do you really get a lot of sellers making fake claims on traffic? Would it be a good idea to look at ways to prevent fake claims or ban sellers like these rather than addressing the problem from the other end? I haven't put any thought into how it could be done - off the top of my head perhaps you could hold a deposit which gets forfeited if the traffic claims are fake. (I'm sure there are many other ways and better ways of discouraging fraudulent claims in the first place.)

Flippa encourages newbies to use their platform to buy sites, and newbies are more likely to take the wrong reassurance from the term verfied traffic stats, IMO.