Due Diligence and Website Analytics: What To Look For in an Adult Website’s Analytics Before You Buy
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 side 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 understand if a website is profitable because of the amount of revenue or net profit a website makes per annum. However, by delving into the website’s analytics, we can better understand how popular an adult site is and track where website traffic is coming 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 looking at the customer reviews, online presence (including social media presence), and digital aspects of an adult website, including all digital assets such as CRM documents and email lists alongside their website and social media analytics, which we will focus on in this article. This type of due diligence is excellent for giving you insights into the adult websites’ reputation, business model, and online operations.
Looking at website analytics allows you to look 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 and social media analytics to explore where your potential website traffic comes from, how many website links need updating, what content works, and heatmap your customer’s 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 any marketing or optimization tactics you will need to focus on once you become the owner, delve into the current user engagement, and map out the customer journey of the adult website you’re interested in potentially 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 allows you to start planning your SEO and content optimization before the purchase has begun, allowing you to 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 that it is continually happening, and the average time per session is constantly 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 what content is popular on the website and what isn’t, allowing you to plan your SEO and content.
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 is making money. This allows you to start planning for scalability for your adult site and identify if there are any new revenue models you could introduce, such as memberships or offering exclusive pay-per-view content for a one-off fee for users who are currently not purchasing memberships.
Traffic Sources
This allows you to track how much traffic your website has coming in and how visitors find your adult site. This could include:
- Direct: 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 through links on an external website, 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 pick up as you do 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 it is expected to have an exit rate 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 measure the number of times a new unique user visits your site during a specific timeframe. Combining it with other data like country sources, pages viewed, etc., can give an 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. Through analytics websites like Semrush, you can easily track and monitor your competitors and your website to understand your website’s position for a specific search term.
Device Type
This monitors how your website is being used by those on it, whether mobile, desktop, etc. and can be a great indicator of how to design your adult site or if you need to make any changes to make the site 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 if you need to update your UX for a better user experience. Some exit pages are natural ending points for a customer journey, such as a sign-up form or payment confirmation.
Revenue Attribution
Revenue attribution is a method that connects marketing efforts with the revenue they generate. It’s a way to understand the most effective marketing channels and where revenue comes from. When done with goal tracking, especially when you set purchases and sign-ups so subscriptions are 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 as 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.
Read more from Adult SIte Broker here:
Challenges For Adult Websites: What To Know Before You Buy
What Questions Should You Ask An Adult Website Broker Before You Sell Your Website?