When buying an adult site, doing your due diligence is crucial in helping you decide whether the website is the proper choice for you. Not only can it be a chance to ask the seller questions and look beyond what is within the initial listing, but also, looking at the website’s analytics can give you a clear indicator of its overall performance.
In this article, Adult Site Broker has broken down what key website analytics you want to look at and why as you perform your digital due diligence before buying an adult website.
What Is Due Diligence?
As previously mentioned, due diligence is an important aspect of the buying process when purchasing an adult website. It’s the chance to dive into all aspects of your potential new site and ensure everything is as it says on paper. This could include looking at the website’s financials, operations, technical, and legal sides and determining how much monthly traffic an adult website has.
In most instances, when due diligence is discussed, we focus on the financial side of the process, trying to determine whether a website is profitable based on its annual revenue or net profit. However, by delving into the website’s analytics, we can better understand how popular an adult site is and track where its traffic comes from. This allows you to start planning your marketing efforts before the website sale is complete.
Why Look At Website Analytics?
Digital due diligence involves reviewing customer reviews, online presence (including social media), and the digital aspects of an adult website, including all digital assets such as CRM documents and email lists, as well as website and social media analytics.
We will focus on this in this article. This type of due diligence is excellent for providing insights into the reputation, business model, and online operations of adult websites.
Looking at website analytics lets you go beyond what a seller says is happening on their site and confirm it for yourself. In most instances, when we talk about website analytics, we focus on website traffic, understanding how many unique new customers a website receives in a month, and trying to understand how many returning customers a website gets.
We can then use Google Analytics and social media analytics to explore where your potential website traffic comes from, how many links need updating, what content works, and to heat-map your customers’ experience.
Beyond this, analytics are crucial for determining not just how popular your website is but also for giving you an in-depth understanding of how the website works and user engagement, and letting you map out the customer journey of the adult website you’re interested in potentially buying.
Using specific website analytics, such as time spent on particular website pages, the bounce rate of website pages when users try to open them, and conversion rates to sales, you can also examine a website’s SEO, UX, and design to understand what works and what doesn’t.
These can give you an in-depth understanding of the marketing and optimization tactics you will need to focus on once you become the owner, help you delve into current user engagement, and map out the customer journey of the adult website you’re interested in buying.
Important Website Analytics To Look At
As a buyer, to get the most out of your analytics due diligence, looking beyond website traffic is essential, offering you clarity and a deeper understanding of potential risks and success, identifying gaps in the current marketing, and allowing you to start planning early on how to optimize your new website after you have bought it. Some of the most crucial website analytics you should focus on when completing due diligence for your new adult website include:
Page Views
This is the number of times a page on your adult site has received a visitor. As the potential new owner of an adult site, it can help you gain clarity on what type of content is popular on the website. This lets you start planning your SEO and content optimization before the purchase begins, so you can budget accordingly.
Average Time Per Session
In analytics, a session can roughly equate to one person visiting your website, viewing a single page, or exploring more of your site. Understanding the average time per session your users stay on your website can help you determine if there are any UX or web design issues (if they are entering and leaving quickly, this could be because they are having problems navigating the website) or that the wrong audience is finding them as they click on the website link and see the content they were not expecting.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who load one page on your website and then leave without interacting with the page or visiting any other pages. If you notice it is happening repeatedly and the average time per session is declining, this can indicate to a potential buyer that the content is no longer trending.
Time on Page
Average time on page measures how long visitors spend on a web page. This can help you understand which content is popular on the website and which isn’t, allowing you to plan your SEO and content strategy.
Conversion Rate
A website’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or clicking a button.
From a profitability perspective, this can help you, as a future adult site owner, understand how the website generates revenue. This allows you to start planning for scalability on your adult site and identify whether there are any new revenue models you could introduce, such as memberships or exclusive pay-per-view content available for a one-off fee to users who are not currently purchasing memberships.
Traffic Sources
This allows you to track how much traffic your website receives and how visitors find your adult site. This could include:
- Direct traffic: These users arrive at your website through a browser bookmark or by entering the URL directly into the browser bar.
- Organic search: These visitors arrived at your website through non-paid results on the search engine results page (SERP).
- Paid search: These visitors arrived by clicking ads displayed on search engine results pages or paid adult ads.
- Referrals: Referral traffic comes to your website via links on external sites, such as affiliate links.
Engagement Rate
Website engagement rate measures the percentage of visitors interacting with a website’s content. A high bounce rate, the percentage of users who leave a website without interacting further, can indicate a lack of user engagement. This could be due to poor website design, irrelevant content, or technical issues, which you will identify as you conduct your due diligence on other aspects of the adult site.
Exit Rate
Exit rate is the average percentage of website visitors who exit from pages on your site. Although an exit rate is expected because no one stays on the same website forever, a 100% exit rate can indicate performance issues on the adult site. It can also help identify what content is performing well and what isn’t.
Returning Visitor Sessions
Returning (or repeat) visitors are users who visit your site more than once during a specific time frame. This indicates the popularity of adult sites and customer loyalty.
New Visitor Sessions
New visitor sessions count the number of times a unique user visits your site within a specific timeframe. Combining it with other data, such as country-level sources, pages viewed, etc., can provide excellent insight into how well you’re expanding into particular audience segments. This allows you, as a potential buyer, to understand the adult sites’ place in the market, their current audience, and whether there is an untapped market you can plan to enter with your adult site.
Pages Per Session
Pages per session are calculated as the average number of pages a user views each session. This can help you understand user engagement with the website you’re interested in buying and map out the customer journey.
Keyword Tracker
It helps site owners monitor the performance of their branded keywords and how well their site is optimized for those searches. Using analytics tools like Semrush, you can easily track your competitors and your website to understand your position for a specific search term.
Device Type
This monitors how your website is used by visitors, whether on mobile or desktop, and can be a great indicator of how to design your adult site or whether you need to make any changes to make it more mobile-friendly.
Top Pages/Top Exit Page
The top pages are the highest-value pages on your site. This term often refers to website pages with the most views or conversions. On the other hand, a top exit page can show where you are losing users and whether you need to update your UX to improve the user experience. Some exit pages are natural endpoints in a customer journey, such as a sign-up form or a payment confirmation.
Revenue Attribution
Revenue attribution is a method for connecting marketing efforts to the revenue they generate. It’s a way to understand which marketing channels are most effective and where revenue comes from.
When done with goal tracking, especially when you set purchases and sign-ups as the goal to track, tracking can help you understand where your marketing efforts need more work.
Conclusion
To wrap up, when buying a valuable and profitable adult site, we must look beyond the financials. Although an adult site might look profitable on paper, understanding how the website performs and how its users engage is equally important.
Website analytics are an excellent tool for buying an adult site. By reviewing a website’s analytics, you can quickly identify any potential red flags or pitfalls you may be taking on, such as low-quality or unpopular content, performance issues, and SEO issues you will need to rectify once you have bought the site.
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