Checking paid advertising history

Is there some way to till if a site has used paid advertising? Lets say I have a site and I use a bunch of paid advertising. These numbers are made up, bare with me.

I dump $1000 a month on advertising. I then have revenue of $500 a month for a net lose of $500 on a month.

Now I go and sell this site and just show the revenue of $500 a month and ask $5000 for the site.

How does one protect themselves from a situation like this when purchasing a site?

Thanks!

 

Look at where the traffic came from. If the seller won't provide that information don'y buy the site.

 

What exactly am I looking for?

 

Where the traffic came from. It's much easier to check out the info for an actual site than it is to discuss this theoretically.

 

You want to check the stats to see what site, search engine, or IP is sending the traffic. Sometimes you'll see a large amount of traffic coming from one source - and that may be a paid source or a source that will remove your link once the site is sold. The problem is that adwords is going to show up as traffic from google.

Screen shots can also easily be faked.

Another trick is to show you adsense totals for more than one site - again, the report html can be altered to give you a fake screen shot or print out.

A shady owner could also have participated in click fraud to boost the sites earnings.

Paying for traffic and then failing to mention this with the gross is a big problem - You are always taking some risk. If you are talking about a site selling for a large amount, I would put the funds in escrow and have some clause about traffic and revenue continuing for at least a short period of time.

If an owner claims traffic is from natural rankings, they can provide you with a list of keywords that is bringing in the bulk of the traffic which you can then cross check to see if they are indeed ranking well for those keywords - and then use wordtracker to get an estimate of the traffic to see if the stats sound reasonable.... i.e. if the keyword they rank #1 for is "blue widget apples" - wordtracker is going to tell you no one searches for it... thus a big red flag.

 

Thanks everybody.

Lets take Adsense ads for example. Is there a common domain which all Adsense clicks come from? Like "adsense.google.com?id=234lkj24&lakdfjadf" whatever it might. Then I just look for those links.