Verifying Google Analytics

[benitez17]

I was reading hooperman's blog today, and saw that he and Clinton both have had experience with sellers who were faking Google Analytics traffic. To be honest, I wasn't aware that Google would allow someone to place the Analytics code on multiple sites and have it report traffic from all of the sites, because it would be relatively easy to just disregard the traffic from domains that don't match the domain in the account.

How did you uncover that the traffic was coming from multiple sites? I am doing due diligence on a site right now, and went through the pages listed as traffic destinations and everything looks OK, but it would be nice to know how to uncover this trick.

[hooperman]

Was it this post? For anyone reading that, the bit referred to by benitez is in the comments.

Clinton mention this tool in another thread: Spy On Web. It finds sites that have the same Adsense/Analytics on them. I've just tried it out now and wow! That is useful.

I've not seen this kind of trick pulled myself (same code on multiple sites) but maybe referrers and keywords might be a sign?

[leadegroot]

Woah! That Spy On Web is eye opening!
But bear in mind that where it is reporting analytics as being on the same site, it isn't quite - its owned by the same owner; the actual sites, when correctly done, should have a hyphen and another couple of characters, so this is only showing the owner's other sites, not showing they are doing anything dodgy with the analytics (so then you check the sites themselves to see if they are up to anything...)

[Clinton]

I've enjoyed playing games with spyonweb type services. Choose a famous site or two at random - preferably owned by someone who has Adsense on several sites - and give them a free Adsense slot on your own page. It doesn't have to be somewhere prominent, it can be the smallest unit right at the bottom of your page below the footer but remember to use their publisher ID. Spyonweb type bots will pick it up and associate your site with somebody else's network.

I have several Adsense accounts (using various limited companies etc). And that's another way to keep your connections safe from spies.

How did you uncover that the traffic was coming from multiple sites?

The first time I discovered it was when researching a site about a certain business software. The main keywords getting traffic were as expected, but about 10% of the traffic - according to GA - came on football related terms. A bit of digging and voila! I discovered that you can use the same GA code across multiple domains and Google will lump them all together.

[benitez17]

Was it this post? For anyone reading that, the bit referred to by benitez is in the comments.

Clinton mention this tool in another thread: Spy On Web. It finds sites that have the same Adsense/Analytics on them. I've just tried it out now and wow! That is useful.

I've not seen this kind of trick pulled myself (same code on multiple sites) but maybe referrers and keywords might be a sign?

That was the post. Thanks for pointing me to Spy On Web. That's an incredibly useful tool.

Also, that was an excellent post Hooperman. I learned a couple new due dilligence tricks because of it, and got some good laughs.

I don't think I have ever seen this trick either and I agree that a little bit of digging in the Google Analytics would turn up some issues like the ones that you pointed out, but I wasn't aware that it was even possible, so I wanted to get some information from people who had seen it in person.