Do you make your stats (traffic) public?

How much do you share with your audience-clients?

[explorador]

Hi there, I've received emails asking for ad space and price. In my niche the competitors do this (ask info) all the time themselves via personal emails or via their partners who are my potential clients.

The value of your ad space has direct relation with your traffic, so when they ask, how much do you share? I've seen sites who post their stats monthly for all their visitors to see, including their competitors.

I'm beginning to feel more relaxed about this, but I also consider a site itself and the links out there plus the statistics are almost the complete formula to study the site as if it was naked, giving too much info to the competition. Anyway, your stats alone could become a great tool to get people to advertise on your site.

[Swanny007]

I have almost all my sites in quantcast. You add a bit of code and they give public stats (& ranking) on their site.

[jake66]

Quantcast reports on my site and I don't even have their code on it.

Where do they get their info from, if you don't use your code?

[Rosalind]

Be careful. People publishing their stats is the exact reason referral spam sprang up and has continued to flourish. You might consider publishing some overall traffic data, rather than going into lots of detail and revealing your referrers.

Remember that there are external sources for traffic stats too, although they all have inherent biases.

[BradleyT]

If your competitors told you how much traffic they got, what exactly are you going to do with that information?

[MadeWillis]

If your competitors told you how much traffic they got, what exactly are you going to do with that information?

One thought would be....target the sites where they are getting most of their traffic from and steal it from my competition.

Unless you have to, why make this public knowledge?

[janharders]

I'm pretty sure if you spend a little time evaluating a site, know the niche, look at the data publicly available, you'll get a pretty good idea about how much traffic that site gets.
your direct competitors usually know who's who in the market.

on the other hand, transparency might be a positive thing. a user might feel secure if he sees he's not alone in his decision. also, potential ad-buyers will surely like to get an idea of your reach without having to contact you, state their credentials etc pp.

One thought would be....target the sites where they are getting most of their traffic from and steal it from my competition.

that'd be google in most cases, and I'm pretty sure you target google already ;)
I agree though, I wouldn't share the details publicly, just the average numbers, how many users, how many visits, how many page views, how much time spent per visit.

[MadeWillis]

that'd be google in most cases, and I'm pretty sure you target google already ;)

Exactly, but that is obvious. I get loads of sales from sites other than Google and if I were a competitor, I'd sure like to know where from.

[janharders]

I get loads of sales from sites other than Google and if I were a competitor, I'd sure like to know where from.

True. But you have a shop, if I understand that correctly, and you're not selling ads on your shop (I hope ;). I wouldn't even give general stats out to anyone of a shop-site, I would however if I run an informational site about widgets that does not contain a shop itself. Of course, general data, I probably wouldn't go down to referrers myself.