Analysis of Flippa's traffic - is Flippa on a downward spiral?

[Clinton]

Got this from Alexa:

flippa1.jpg

If you don't have much trust in Alexa and don't see the sharp drop as meaning anything, there's this from Quantcast:

flippa2.jpg

Their traffic seems sharply lower no matter how you look at it. Summer (in the North) is a quiet time for this business and it should have been picking up sharply by October.

Did their lack of a marketing manager make a difference? Their ad spend has dropped as well:

flippa3.jpg

But the apparent big decline in traffic couldn't have been as a result of the lower ad spend as they get a very small percentage of their traffic through PPC.

Is something wrong here or is it just the bursting of the template bubble being reflected in these graphs?

[petertdavis]

That's just Alexa, right? Do you have any actual stats?

[grynge]

Could it have anything to do with the errors and page loading problems people have been getting since their last update?

[benitez17]

The Quantcast numbers don't look too bad, with a nice surge in the summer and then a return to the norm. However, the Alexa numbers look terrible. Given the conflicting information (and the completely unreliable sources), I wouldn't bet on Flippa's demise based on this data alone.

It would be interesting to track these numbers against Flippa's self reported stats on the listing pages, but I suspect that Flippa is manipulating them by defining "right now" as "in the last 8 - 24 hours" or are just counting the number of people who are logged in to the site, because I have never seen the number of people reported to be on the site below 1,000, and I have been checking in on Flippa fairly often at different times of the day over the last few weeks.

[Clinton]

grynge, I raised a support ticket and Flippa and Dave replied to say they've been affected by a DDOS attack over the last few days. You say there was a techical update as well that could have caused problems? There's no mention of that in Dave's reply.

I'm not 100% convinced that this is the sole cause of their drop. The Alexa chart shows the drop started around two weeks ago and they had stagnant traffic for the three months before that. Quantcast shows a decline since August.

I wouldn't bet on Flippa's demise based on this data alone.

If you look at Alexa and other stats for their competitors such as websiteproperties.com you'll see a steady and impressive increase over the last few months. In the coming months websiteproperties should show an even bigger increase with their direct Flippa competitor attracting traffic and business away from Flippa.

I'm not predicting Flippa's demise, but something is happening.

Perhaps flipfilter has some numbers and stats for us?

[benitez17]

Perhaps flipfilter has some numbers and stats for us?

That's something I would like to see.

[daveslutzkin]

grynge, I raised a support ticket and Flippa and Dave replied to say they've been affected by a DDOS attack over the last few days. You say there was a techical update as well that could have caused problems? There's no mention of that in Dave's reply.

no, there wasn't. because there was absolutely no connection between any minor changes to the software and some issues we've experienced under uncharacteristic, malicious, distributed load.

I'm not 100% convinced that this is the sole cause of their drop. The Alexa chart shows the drop started around two weeks ago and they had stagnant traffic for the three months before that. Quantcast shows a decline since August.

alexa tends to under-represent https sites. on the fifth of november, we moved to https all over our site. this improved security for our users, but dropped our alexa ranking. i think i know which of those our users actually care about.

[flipfilter]

Perhaps flipfilter has some numbers and stats for us?

I made a promise of no blogging, forums, social media until Flipfilter V2 was complete - it's funny how Google Alerts works like the Batman sign

I'll take a look but as Dave has already given a logical explanation it seems like case closed?

[hooperman]

alexa tends to under-represent https sites.

I never knew that. Apparently Alexa turns itself on secure pages.

[Clinton]

Yes, hoop, there are lots of exceptions and caveats. But if you're quoting from this page, it's very old and the Alexa info page they're quoting changed long ago and doesn't mention https anymore.

But in this case Alexa did raise the right flag - something changed drastically. If Flippa has moved their entire site to https as Dave says and Alexa doesn't count https pages then, yes, it would account for a drop in Alexa rank to way down in the millions. However, that has not happened. It has dropped to about 1,200.

A quick check shows that the Flippa blog isn't behind https.

If that's the only section of Flippa not behind https then Flippa's Alexa rank from here forward is going to be representing only the Flippa blog and not the rest of Flippa.

What interesting is how little the rank dropped. When you remove all of Flippa auction pages, "due diligence" pages and the rest of the marketplace their rank has dropped only 500 places. The new position needs to settle a bit, but if it settles at around where it is now my guess is that the blog is what accounts for the bulk of Flippa's traffic, maybe even over 90% of the traffic. This comes as a bit of a surprise.

because there was absolutely no connection between any minor changes to the software and some issues we've experienced under uncharacteristic, malicious, distributed load.

Sorry about the problems you've had, Dave, hopefully it's all sorted now.