Team Meeting: Jul 7, 2026

2026-07-07 · Ben · digest

Week of Jun 30 to Jul 6. Numbers first, then what shipped, then what needs a call. Every metric below is checked against two sources, not assumed.

📊 By the numbers

Metric	Value	The good news (and how it's confirmed)
Traffic is growing	6,264 sessions · +24% wk/wk	Best week in a while. (bowtie.)
Affiliate clicks are growing faster	~480/day, up wk/wk	The money-path traffic (clicks out to providers) is climbing right alongside sessions. (our own /out tracking, D1.)
Search visibility is climbing	573K impressions, and rising	Google is surfacing us more (up ~5% in the last few days). (Search Console.)
International content is earning its keep	6–7% CTR · ~360 affiliate clicks	Persian + Arabic pages get clicked ~7× the site average (vs 0.9%) and drove ~360 clicks out to providers in two weeks (Arabic + French leading). (Search Console + our /out tracking.)
Money pages convert hard	free-VPN ~2 in 5 (39.6%)	~40% of visitors to our free-VPN pages click through toward a checkout, and the translated versions convert even harder: nearly 1 in 2 (Arabic 47%, Persian 59%, Chinese 43%). (bowtie + our /out tracking.)
Gateway is gaining momentum	~60–78 buy-clicks/day	The rebuilt gateway is the main money path now, and daily volume is climbing as more providers route through it. (our tracking + Nord's report.)

✅ Shipped

"Best VPN for X" pages, rebuilt: 15 of them, live. Netflix, Gaming, the Streaming hub, plus Windows, Mac, router, business and more. Each now leads with the real app-store rating (★4.7 from millions of reviews) instead of a bland "/100", stacks cleanly on mobile, and shows a money-back-guarantee line. Built as reusable components, so the whole cluster upgrades at once.
New "verdict" gateway. Every lesser-known provider now gets a side-by-side "you picked X, here's why we recommend Y" comparison. Wins our pick 53% of the time. (Link is the live page.)
Caught a silent revenue leak. Our personalization test had been broken for weeks (never reached checkout). Fixed, then auto-seeded so it fires across the SEO traffic. First real data lands this week.
Surfshark checkout fixed. Plan buttons now hit the correct 1-month / 1-year / 2-year checkout instead of a generic link.
App-store ratings on all 22 providers, now surfaced across the gateway and the rebuilt pages.
Plus: exit popup back to a 3-way test, citations on 6 review pages.

📈 Gateway, by the numbers

The rebuilt gateway is now the main money path. Where each piece stands:

Nord "plan confirm" (the high-intent path): ~22 buy-clicks/day, flat before and after the redesign.
Verdict comparison (everyone else): ~580 views/week, 53% take our recommendation.
All providers combined: ~61 buy-clicks/day, up from ~23 when it was Nord-only, as we routed Surfshark, Express and others through it.

🔵 Needs a decision (let's discuss)

Domain broker: the Jul 10 checkpoint (stay on /domain-broker vs revert to /domains). This call is about organic rankings and traffic: did the section win back its Google visibility after the URL change? Honest read: not fully there yet. The section isn't among our top organic pages, and "domain broker" isn't yet ranking in a clickable spot. The encouraging part: we fixed a bug where Google's crawler was hitting 404s on the old domain-broker URLs, which triggered a fresh re-crawl, the exact mechanism that lets rankings recover. Before the 10th I'll pull the section's real Search Console numbers (organic clicks / impressions / position) against our stay-thresholds so we decide on data, not vibes.
Arabic + China Nord traffic: ~360 clicks, $0. To be precise about "why zero": Nord does sell there. It routes those visitors to dedicated offers (NordVPN Arabia, NordVPN China), so it isn't a block. Our traffic simply converts at 0%. Whether that's price, payment friction, or low buying intent, we don't know yet. The call: keep pointing them at Nord, or send them to something that fits those markets?

👀 Watching (no action needed)

Use-case personalization: tracking fixed and auto-seed shipped, so it now fires for the SEO/deep-link majority, not just homepage clickers. First real adoption read in ~2 days.
Nord buys post-redesign: steady at ~22/day, watching that it holds.