Is there any way to verify claimed Adsense Earnings ?

[Swiftace]

Hi Everyone,

I am currently keeping an eye on a few Adsense websites with a view to buy and am wondering if there is anyway to actually verify that the adsense revenue that someone claims they are earning is legit ?

At the moment at most i can go on is there word and a screenshot (Which is too easily faked).

I have seen some mention of getting a site owner to put up your adsense ID for a day or two so you can see the stats but i would be worried about my adsense account then coming under scrutiny from google.

Is there some way to do an estimation based on traffic , an average CTR and the average CPC of keywords in the niche of the website ?

At the moment im thinking it might just be about doing other due diligence the website and if everything adds up then you might be able to "trust" them.

But of course i would be far happier if there was a way to know for sure

Thanks in advance !

[eppie]

You can have them create a report in AdSense and then email it directly to your account -- here's a link describing the process: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/can_i_g...via_email.html

The only trouble with that is it doesn't send immediately. In fact, it may be 24 hours after it's set before it actually sends out -- it's been a while since I used this tool. I'm also not sure what email address it comes from, but I'm pretty sure it's a Google address.

You could also have them record a screencast of logging in to their account and showing their data. This is harder to fake than a screenshot, but not all that difficult -- one would just have to change their local hosts file to point google.com to 127.0.0.1, setup a local installation of WAMP, XAMPP, or MAMP, and then recreate the Google login screen, and any of the internal stats pages. Then they could fake their data and you'd never know.

Having them add your adsense code works, except they could always just add it to a bunch of other sites, too -- giving you the false impression that the stats are coming from the site you're buying when they really aren't.

I hate to poke a hole in all of the possible means of verification, but anyone who's so inclined could fake just about anything online.

[hooperman]

You could also share screens with something free like crossloop, but you still have the small chance that they messed with their host file like eppie says. As part of your DD, you should use something like Reverse Internet to check for multiple sites using the same Adsense/Analtyics code.

[rob]

As above the usual DD

Depending on the site I have also put a 'clause' in purchase that adsense must stay within 10% of rev for X days after move, or , adsense channeled prior to buy to verify.

[Clinton]

rob, but that's not fair on the seller if smartpricing kicks in and the quality of your Adsense account relative to his impacts on the earnings post sale. Don't any sellers object to the terms on those grounds?

Swiftace, I always find it interesting to take day-by-day Adsense metrics and overlay it with traffic stats and other stats you may have (like affiliate program stats). If Adsense shows a sudden spike in pageviews on a particular day, is that matched by a similar spike in the traffic stats? That sort of thing. Convert both Adsense pageview and traffic stats pageview columns into line graphs and you can easily see where they diverge.

[rob]

Not had any objections yet - I have done it a couple of times with no issue.

Usually I either take a punt based on gut feeling, or get channels setup which makes tracking easier.

I have recently bought a forum with split payments, ie. cash upfront and if targets met then they get 50% of the next 3 mths income. Plan being to sit on it and not change anything until new year

Going back to the OP - as long as you are aware of the possible issue and try to mitigate it / build it into your pricing, then you are doing ok. There isnt a foolproof method to avoid that I am aware of.

[Clinton]

No, there's no foolproof measure, but with the right precautions you can be 99.9999% sure it's genuine.

I do have one advantage that shouldn't be discounted. I don't mean to boast but having done numerous due diligence exercises both for myself and on behalf of clients I have a large collection of (confidential) stats on hundreds of sites. If I come across a site in a certain industry, the stats on file give me an idea of how other sites in that industry perform, what CTRs they get, what EPCs, how much the income varies from off season to peak, from day to day. That's proven very useful in the past. I guess what I'm saying is that every time you do DD on a site, keep a copy of the stats you're given access to.

[Swiftace]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

It sounds like, as Clinton said above, there is no fool proof measure. Just have to weigh all the factors up.

I do like the idea of getting the report emailed to you, although this could also be faked (You can set the from address of email you send to anything you want), but still something to try.

I will request this from all the auctions on my Flippa watch list and see what type of response i get.

I also like the idea of paying half the price up front and the other half once the reported income is confirmed. Certainly something i would want if i was making a larger investment. Not sure how people in the sub $2000 range would feel about that and that is where i am looking to make my next investment.

Overall it appears that i bit of instinct is required.

Yesterday i did try something else, there was an auction on flippa with a reported monthly adsense revenue of $50 (With screenshots). The site had no content, an exact match domain and was on the first page of yahoo and bing SERPS but nowhere on google. The buy it now price of the site was only a 5x multiple.

But given that the site was basically empty it seemed a bit too good to be true

So i looked through the sellers history and found he had sold a few other sites that were very similar, empty sites, exact match domain, first page serps for bing and yahoo. So i went ahead and contacted one of the people who had purchased his site previously, he was kind enough to write back in length and started off his email as follows :

"As for "website.com" the claims by the previous owner bordered on fraudulent."

Glad i reached out and asked

[Swiftace]

Well I sent out a bunch of requests to see if Flippa sellers will send an adsense report by email as suggested above.

So far one replay that was as follows :

"
Hi,
Sorry I can't do that, it's too confusing for me.
Regards,
"



Will let you know what others say.

[Clinton]

So i looked through the sellers history

Got a link? Maybe we can do some DD on this seller - example.