I'm purchasing a site but have come across some oddities in the analytics. I haven't see this before and I'm interested in knowing how this can be done. It looks like bots are searching for words and clicking onto the site in analytics but they aren't being logged by the queries. What do you think? Both images attached are the same site in the same time period sept 18 - oct 18th.
Average position 78 with 5500 click-through? What the hell are the keywords? It would have to be a viral trend like princess kates nudies or something to have an average position of 78 and gather 5500 clicks. Consider position #10 on page 1 gets just under 1% of keyword search clicks. Average position 78 would have to be something like 0.0001% of keyword search clicks. Now to get 5500 clicks on your 78 ranked keywords (average ranking) would be nothing short of miraculous. Check Alexa traffic because with that kind of volume Alexa should be way under 100,000 and you can gleen % of traffic from search engines and from what geos from Alexa. If Alexa isn't under 100K then this is bot traffic for sure. JMHO
I thought the click through ratio only applied if the user actually went to page 6 if is was position 78 and there was an option to click the link. If not then yeah, I agree, something is way off. The alexa rank is around 350K which is actually in line compared to some of the other sites I have that get 3-4K visits per day. The keywords are technology related. Thanks for your insight.
Further to what kvmcable says above, there seems to be a massive jump right in the beginning of the 1st image. It looks like traffic jumped from 0 to the current level in one day. Needless to say, this isn't common at all and unless the site ranks for viral keywords (which, as you said, it doesn't) it would strongly suggest junk/bot traffic. P.S. Do you have live access to Analytics or only screenshot? If you've only been sent screenshots/printouts then demand live access and do some more digging!
Exactly what Bryan Said on 1st day "0 to 3k" LOL Another Thing - Demand To see Keywords from which the traffic came
That sort of traffic number without a long history isn't common unless it's a porn site or hit and run viral site. Demand more reports going back 6 months at least. My guess is he doesn't have them and if that's the case just pass. This is a common scenario on Flippa and with some of the new visitor bot tools the traffic numbers are very easy to spoof on these limited information screenshots. Have him post the Country, Browser, Screen Resolution, ISP information statistics for all this traffic and you'll most likely see the easy pattern a bot leaves. All Google traffic without any direct traffic is hardly normal. All those visitors and Nobody came to this website from a link not in Google search results? I find that impossible to believe. There should be a mix of direct and search traffic in any legitimate traffic report. I bet as quickly as the traffic went from 0 to 3000 visitors a day is how quick the traffic drops once the site is sold.
A good sign that this traffic is bullshit is the % from Google. It's accounts for about 99.9% of all the site traffic according to your first screenshot which never happens. You almost always get a decent % of direct traffic as people will return to the site, bookmark it or send it to a friend.
These do seem quite illegitimate. As the others above have said, demand to see the keywords or some live analytics. Also, the 3k in traffic would probably disappear the moment you buy it, watch out...
Don't want to look like a smart-head, because you probably know 20x more about analytics than me, but this thing happens when you install analytics for the first time on an established website. Just my 2 cents..
Yes, this could be right, and for the sake of the buyer, I hope that it is I also find it quite hilarious that no one else though of that
Thanks for the from everyone that responded. I did have full analytics access and that is why I found the stats weird. Once I brought it to the seller's attention he removed my access to analytics. One of the weirdest stats was that about 50% of the traffic was "returning traffic" which didn't make sense at all. The country data all seemed to line up ok. He claims he was doing something with google news to bring in tons of traffic but the keyword data just didn't make sense. Yesterday the site got 3000 visits from one keyword that got 34 visits the day prior. I didn't see anything come up in google news for that keyword. That keyword only gets 3K searches/month also. I'm bailing on this deal. If it's too good to be true it normally is. I paid about the same price for a site that makes $1,200/month and this one is claiming $7,000/month. I did income verify for a day and made $300 that day. I hope my adsense account doesn't get banned...
Good work, don't stick around in that deal for too long. Yes, your adsense might get affected :\ Hopefully Google are nice on your part They usually just ban people straight away for that kind of the thing (Probably just new accounts I guess). Yes, if a keyword only is searched around 3k times/month than the odds are that it isn't all just in the one day. By him denying you access to the analytics the moment you pointed it out means that it is definitely not legit. Just try and find another, better deal Enjoy
If more people realised this then there would be much less fraud going on in this industry Glad you got away from making a potentially very big mistake!
