Hi all, I'm currently in the process of examining a website, with the hope of purchasing it if everything checks out. During the initial auction of the site, the seller posted an adsense screenshot for November showing the earnings per day, as well as the total earnings and page impressions for the month, but with the later dates in the month cut off. I entered into negotiations with the seller, and during the process they sent me a few more screenshots. The screenshot they sent me for November has the same overall impressions and earnings as the one posted in the auction, but the individual earnings (per day of the month) do not match up. In some cases, they vary wildly. My question is this: Is there any legitimate reason for why the earnings between the two screenshots are so wildly different? Does adsense sometimes alter earnings (by fairly large margins) much later? Thanks for your help.
I asked the person for an explanation, and the response I got was that in one set of pictures the adsense search channel was not selected, and therefore was not integrated into the earnings. To me, this doesn't sound very likely. Looking at both the screenshots, it seems like there's something suspicious going on. You'll notice that on the auction page the earnings for the 6th of November are $62.66, while on the emailed page those earnings correspond to November 11th. Similarly, the auction earnings for the 10th of November correspond to the email earnings of November 12th, and there's a few more examples of that. My question is the same as in the first post: is there any legitimate reason to explain these discrepancies? Auction screenshot http://img339.imageshack.us/my.php?image=novemberjpgcopyju5.jpg Emailed screenshot http://img502.imageshack.us/my.php?image=november2nq2.jpg (On both screenshots the channel was the same, I've simply removed it)
If you are in serios negotiations then get him to give you viewing only access to his adsense reports (and his analytics reports). If he refuses, then walk away. Also ask Google if the account is OK?
something i think you have to take note is, around November 15th~ 2007, google adsense changed the clickable area for ads to only the ad title and ad url, the text is no longer clickable. If the site has some very aggressive placement that makes some money with accidental click, the earning might drop by a lot after the adsense change. You should ask for screesnhots of earnings in Dec, Jan, Feb, why showing earning of November. That's 3 months ago already.
Thanks for the responses guys. seedybee68: I got him to install analytics a few days ago, but currently the reports aren't showing me that much traffic. I suspect the reason is in the way the website is designed. It's a filesharing site, and the script is hosted on one domain while the files themselves are on a few separate hosting packages in order to distribute the bandwidth load. This is a cause of a lot of the problems with the transaction, since it's really hard to track visitors, etc. across so many hosting packages (which are redirected as sub-domains of the main site). Also, I don't think there's an adsense guest account feature, unfortunately. yyCC: The auction also included screenshots for December adsense earnings (only the aggregate score) and some of January's stats, but those are identical on both sets of screenshots he sent me. Is it possible that his explanation (search channel not included) is correct?
I agree with yyCC 100%. I also don't get what you're saying. Let's just focus on November 4th 2007 right now: Picture 1 $4.34 WITHOUT ADSENSE FOR SEARCH Picture 2 $45.00 WITH ADSENSE FOR SEARCH Then November 10, 2007: Picture 1: $45.30 WITHOUT ADSENSE FOR SEARCH Picture 2: $78.75 WITH ADSENSE FOR SEARCH Nov. 4 seems like BS to me 100% November 10... 30+$ w/ AdSense for search? I don't believe it. Sorry! If you want a little more advice you can PM me the domain, but I'd stay away from it. This is assuming I have the information correct and understood what you first said completely (which I already mentioned I think I didn't).
Unfortunately, it seems like you have the information correct. What I find to be most suspicious is not only the seemingly very large payments of the Adsense search, but also the fact that, as I pointed out in the first post, the data appears to be shifted. The screenshots for December show earnings of ~$1500 (without breaking it down by day), while the screenshot for January shows earnings until January 22nd of ~$720. This is unusual in itself, since from the 5th to 8th the site made $0, on the 10th it made $0.33, and only then did it slowly ramp back up. What is most unusual is that there's no actual earnings shown for January 9th? Is there any explanation for this? Here is a screenshot of the January earnings: http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=january2fc7.jpg Thanks for all the help so far.
sounds like this person is not totally honest about the adsense earnings and might have photoshopped the images.
It's starting to look that way...I currently have my own analytics on the pages, and the person selling the site is willing to let me trial adsense by putting my code on the page, so I imagine that things will make themselves clear in the next few days.