Website Sellers
Website sellers. What are we to do with them? It seems that the vast majority are not dealing from a full pack. Take this one, for example. The very first question, a request to post traffic stats, is asked on a Friday, and the seller only gets around to responding to it the following Thursday. That's customer service for you. You would think the seller doesn't want to part with their beloved site after all. Strike 1!
You can see that there were actually two questions before the seller decided to respond, and when he did, he completely ignored the first! Strike 2. Making bidders wait and then ignoring their questions. This guy hasn't gotten round to reading "How To Make Friends And Influence People".
I PMed the seller to add me to his Google Analytics account, which, to his credit, he promptly did. Regarding the claimed traffic of 2,100 uniques / month - guess what? That's right, the real traffic was nowhere near. It was more like 330/month. But of course, a monthly total of 330 uniques won't sell as well as a total of 2,100. So let's simply make up the stats. If anyone questions them, we can always silence them with an outburst of gibberish.
Gibberish Corner
If anyone knows what this gibberish means, please enlighten me.
Hmmm - I am getting more than that. I only have it on one page and have been having problems with it. Income is still strong and if Google Analytics is your SOLE source of information that you rely on, then have fun with that as I anyone can manipulate analyitcs
Thanks
You are getting more than that? How? We are both looking at the same stats! And what do you mean you have it on only one page? Just take a look at any random page you pick on the site and you can see the Google Analytics code there! What do you mean Anyone can manipulate analytics???? Duh. If that was true, why didn't you manipulate it to show decent traffic stats? And just how can someone manipulate those stats? Anyway, it doesn't matter whether people can manipulate those stats - they weren't manipulated in this case. Jeez, I don't know why I bother wasting my time on an auction site that is full of junk and is host to the weakest members of the gene pool who don't know how to interrelate with other people and see nothing wrong with lying about their sites' performance. Schoolkids and failed "internet marketers" mostly.
You think sellers are bad? Have you seen the Flippa staff lateley? Stay tuned, I can't wait to tell you about that "disappointment". You don't know what vitriolic rant means!
For G's sake get me my meds, I'm having a heart attack here!
Therapist's Note: Paul won't be posting for a short time while we work on some issues.
Paul, hope you’re feeling better
I’ve recently being doing a due diligence job on behalf of a client and discovered a large disparity in the Analytics stats. It turned out the seller had the same analytics code on multiple sites!
GA offers the option of a site by site separation within an account. Some sellers make mistakes setting it up. Some deliberately use the same code on multiple sites and I’ve found that there’s also unintentional third party contamination: one site giving away free templates ended up with hundreds of sites using not just their template code but, inadvertently, their GA code as well.
Can’t wait to hear your rant.
Hi FMP
That’s sneaky with the GA code on free templates. That reminds me of publishers putting their adsense code in free downloadable templates.
I don’t think I’ve seen the site by site separation in GA, I’ll have a look for that – ta.
I don’t believe the template site intended to muddy their results. It’s just a risk they faced dealing with the newbies who were their typical visitors.
GA allocates extension numbers, one per site: Eg: UA-123456-1, UA-123456-2, UA-123456-3 etc. But it relies on you to post them in the right places.
You have some great content here!
I discovered how GA can be manipulated by making the mistake myself that FruitMedley Post pointed out. I’d been adding the code to several niche blogs I’d set up at once and mistakenly added the same code to two different websites. I didn’t realise until later down the track when my stats were showing weird keywords etc. I’ve mentioned to the guys at Flippa.com that I wouldn’t rely on GA as they can be manipulated. Accessing an account and thoroughly looking over the origin of the traffic and or the keywords driving it could reveal the truth. I guess the problem is that most people don’t know to look out for that type of thing and with a ‘verified by Flippa’ pdf, well it creates even more trust in the stats.
Danger corner is a great idea, I’m looking forward to more of your posts there!
Thanks for the kind words Michelle!
GA has details about the full path of the URL being visited so it’s a shame they don’t make that information available. You’re dead right about having to be thorough when looking through some site’s stats. Call me nerdy, but I actually enjoy poring over traffic statistics