I'm on the verge of buying a website where MOST of the traffic comes DIRECTLY as indicated in Analytics. I understand that usually it means type-ins or bookmarks. But can this figure be manipulated?? How abt purchased traffic, can they come 'DIRECTLY'? How can I check that the DIRECT traffic is genuinely from type-ins and bookmarks?? Appreciate any experience hands' advice. tks.
I guess you can add email marketing to the list. They could do email blasts, so once they stop (you get the site) the traffic might disappear.
that is a very good point, tks. But traffic coming from email is considered DIRECT? If they accessed their email from Outlook perhaps but if from any web email like gmail, it shld register the source as gmail instead of DIRECT right? any other opinions on this? really need more insights.... btw baumann, rep given, tks
If the amount of traffic is not extremely high the selling it to you could have just gone to his own site a ton of times before selling it to you to make it look like a lot of traffic. or set up a bot on some computer to go to it over and over.
Email marketing will still most probably show as traffic from a referring site; The url of the email on which they did the email marketing. I would go as many months back as possible. Also, a good visual inspection of the site and it's services may give you an idea as to how many people would come to the site on their own. As an example very few blogs get type in traffic. The answer to your question, there is no real way to check for legit traffic. You have to go by your discretion. Go to the wayback machine and see how the site looked in the past. Just normal work anybody would do before buying a site.
This is possibly the funniest thing I've seen all day. This idiot is posting this nonsensical post in as many threads as possible so he can start threads/post links.
I don't think so. For email marketing usually people clicks on links in the email, and the Analytics will report the server url.
Check out the following link, it explains the direct traffic: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=60126&cbid=1o64b98ixwwo9&src=cb If you are buying a site, I would advise you to focus on conversion rather than traffic source. Find out how's the conversion like and how much traffic is coming from the search engines. You can't be wrong with a site pulling in good amount of organic search traffic Good luck!
Check how does your traffic behave. If it's artificial it has insanely high bounce rate, hostnames aren't relatively random, it comes in peaks, etc. Basically what you want to do is to learn as much as you can about it and analytics is great because it reports a lot of various statistics. Good luck
tks for the tip and link KC. i know that conversion is important but i also need to be sure that the traffic is legit and not faked in order to get the sale. jose, excellent point on bounce rate! didn't think of that one. bounce rate is pretty low actually, hmm.... gives me more assurance that it is legit then. Rep given
i don't think so there is any other method if analytics cant check that .but some assumptions will get it right if the website is getting 5k+ daily visitors try getting answer to these questions 1.how much organic traffic is it getting (if it is getting very less organic compared to direct , then something is fishy 2. how old is the website (if its few month , then something is fishy) 3. try founding the results of websites which are higher than your website in the same niche and compare , if something is not getting right something is fishy
if its from a traffic programm take a look at the amount of time the users are staying on the site for. if most are leaving in under 10 secs then chances are they are from a traffic / email / programm. if so work out how many of those numbers are converting to sales. often enough targeted traffic sources will attract greater conversion rates and proves better value for the $$$
it is also possible to inflate numbers with traffic dumps from domain dns redirects. it will look like it was destined for the front door of the site the hits are dumped on.
RSS is the best source of direct traffic.. if you can build a good list of subscribers, that would be great..
It's a little tricky... It could be easily email lists, or manipulated traffic. But it can also mean that it's a very sticky site such as a forum or blog.
I dont think it is email blasts, if it were it is likely it would show up in the referers as coming from the mail servers of gmail, msn etc.
I doubt it's from emails. You would see a ton of refers from hotmail, yahoo, and google. Just a few days ago I had a huge surge of direct non referencing hits according to my Google analytics. I checked my server log, and it turned out to be a bot from a black hat site. Traffic quality from it? 92% bounce rate.