I'm looking in to buying a website and I would like to check out the webstats myself, is there a way I can do this? Is this ethical? I'm clueless - any help would be appreciated.
Depends what kind of tracker they use. Try looking up "site:url stats" for example (replace stats with a few different common terms for stats analytics programs, ie: awstats), and some of the public trackers, like "site:extremedm.com url". That's a good way to check how many visitors a link from that site might refer - very useful in some industries.
you can look up the site on urlappraisal.net and it should show you all the stats of the site - alexa rank, unique monthly views, how much the site is worth, google pagerank, and things along those lines! Hope this helps
Can you not get the weblogs from the owner of the site? If they are interested in being paid something for their website, proof of traffic is an important part of the deal.
It can be done legally. Contact the seller and express your interested to acquire her site. Then ask he to allow you to access her google analytic account in order to verified the claimed stat.
As the others have said above, you can only find out their stats if they've not protected them. It is possible to google to find some unprotected ones, but you're likely to be unlucky. I just used urlappraisal.net to check one of my sites and it says 1200 visitors/month - but I get about 16-20,000 on that one, so that's just a guess from their algorithm. If you are a serious buyer, then ask the owner, if he wants to sell it he should show you. It's like a business. If you are buying a business you expect to see their books.
Thanks everyone, I guess after being online for a while I have trust issues when I am getting ready to spend money. People can fake anything online so I wanted to go directly to a stat site and see numbers instead of looking at a report that someone sends to me. Thanks Random Guy and parsons130 I'll check out your suggestions.
Ask the guy if he has google analytics installed..if he has then tell him to add you so that you can see his stats.. the seller should not say no to it..
Hi Like many of the others have said on here ask the website owner for 'access' to his stats be they from Google analytics or cpanel, if he is unwilling to do it run a mile. You could also look at alexa.com and quantcast.com to get an idea of the traffic he is bringing in. John
You can use websites some websites to estimate the visitors but nothing more. Ask the actual owner to show you the stats.
I have had luck typing in the url followed by /stats. It might suprise you that many are not protected.
Don't trust the unique estimates from any site other than Statcounter or Google Analytics. For Google analytics, all you have to do is give them your GA e-mail and you can then log in and check their stats. I think you can do the same on Statcounter. Estimates on other sites that claim a certain number of Uniques are an estimate based on several factors. About as reliable as Alexa. BR
You can use approximation tools like Alexa and Compete - but you can never rely on them to give you a true picture. You can get access if someone forgot to set security/password. That's described more in this article I wrote together with other information on getting stats (like how to get stats with javascript level of reliability - like Google Analytics - even if the site owner doesn't have any javascript stats tracking installed).
You cannot view the exact visitor stats of a site unless they provide the information, or use open counters like statcounter etc which shows the visitors. Alexa can be used but it is not updated daily, you cannot view unique visitors exactly in Alexa, there will be a huge variation in Alexa data and exact data in many cases