Traffic proof

Just like we needed with revenue, we need legitimate proof of traffic for a website that we’re looking to buy. A spreadsheet or a screenshot showing traffic data is not sufficient, as they’re pretty easy to fake and leave out a lot of very important data!

Instead, we need detailed data on users, sessions, pageviews, time on page, and other vital stats. Fortunately, there’s two ways that this can be tackled.

First, if you’re buying a website from a broker, most of the time they’ll go into the analytics of a website and verify everything themselves. They essentially give their stamp of approval that the traffic is legitimate and will report the numbers themselves.

I will say that typically websites that are being sold by a broker are higher ticket, and you’ll be granted access to the Google Analytics yourself, but their reporting does help weed out potential websites a lot faster.

Next up, as you can imagine, is getting access to a website’s Google Analytics in order to verify traffic numbers yourself.

Google Analytics has the ability to grant “view” permissions to other emails, meaning that at your request, the website owner can let you in to verify the traffic and all the data yourself.

There is no risk to the website owner doing this. Any time that a website owner refuses to let me into the Google Analytics to verify traffic for myself, it’s a massive red flag and I just move on from the website.

It does make sense if a website owner doesn’t want to grant view access to everybody that asks, so you want to make sure that you’re a verified user that looks legitimate. If they’re still not granting permission when you’re clearly a legitimate buyer, it’s time to move on.

Once you’re in, you’ll be able to analyze the most important aspects of the traffic that I’ll highlight in the following videos.