Traffic sources

With this portion, you’re essentially asking if a website’s traffic is coming from where you would expect it to come from. Google Analytics makes this portion very easy to check out, and the logic behind it is simple as well!

The traffic source of a website should match the type of website that’s being sold. For instance, ecommerce websites typically have high percentages of direct traffic because these websites depend on advertising to acquire customers. On the other hand, affiliate websites and blogs should primarily be made up of organic traffic, or traffic that comes from people searching on search engines.

In fact, to be more specific, Google Analytics has two different metrics: Source and Medium. The source is where the traffic originated from, so Google or Facebook or Direct for people that typed in your URL. Medium is the type of traffic, so organic, CPC, referral, or none for direct.

Most, if not all websites that you buy should be primarily made up of organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. This means that the website has a lot of content that’s organically ranking and bringing in website visitors without any adspend! This traffic is very difficult to fake — especially if you can verify the corresponding articles are actually ranking well in search engines or not.

If you’re looking to purchase an ecommerce website, then primarily direct traffic is acceptable — you’ll just have to do a lot more research into the total advertising spend, return on advertising, and how you can keep the ad campaigns running.

All websites will have a mixture of traffic sources. For reference, one of my websites has 96% organic traffic, 3% direct traffic, 1% referral traffic, and then a couple of social media visits.