Google Analytics 101
A listing's revenue chart is whatever the seller or broker chose to show you. Google Analytics is the business's own record of how visitors actually behave, and it's much harder to dress up. If you can get access before you make an offer, it's some of the most useful due diligence you can do without waiting for the full data room a signed letter of intent (LOI) unlocks.
How to get access
Depending on the platform or broker, you may already have view-only access bundled with the listing. More often, you'll need to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) first, since brokers commonly gate analytics access behind one along with the full financials, even before an offer. Once that's signed, request read-only access to the property directly, not a shared login. If a seller refuses reasonable analytics access after you've engaged seriously and signed an NDA, treat that as a data point on its own.
What to actually check
- Traffic trend over 12 to 24 months. Is revenue growth backed by more visitors, or is the business squeezing more revenue out of a flat or shrinking audience? The second is a riskier trend to extrapolate forward.
- Source mix. How much traffic comes from organic search, paid ads, direct, referral, and social. A business that's 90% dependent on one channel, especially one Google algorithm update away from disappearing, carries more risk than the listing's revenue chart alone would suggest.
- Bounce rate and session behavior. A high bounce rate or very short average session length can mean the traffic isn't actually engaged, which matters more for a content or affiliate site than for a transactional store.
- Conversion behavior. For an e-commerce or SaaS business, check whether conversion tracking is even set up correctly, and whether conversion rate has been stable, improving, or declining over the same period as revenue.
- New vs. returning visitors. A business living almost entirely on new visitor traffic depends more heavily on continuous, unpaid or paid acquisition than one with a healthy base of returning visitors.
Red flags to watch for
- A sudden, unexplained traffic spike or drop that doesn't line up with the seller's story about why revenue moved.
- Traffic numbers that don't reconcile with what a free public tool (like a browser extension traffic estimator) roughly shows. They won't match exactly, but a large gap is worth asking about.
- Analytics that were only recently installed, which means you're evaluating weeks of data instead of the 12 to 24 month trend you actually need.
The takeaway
Google Analytics won't tell you everything, but it's one of the few pieces of evidence in early due diligence that's genuinely hard for a seller to fake. Pair it with the revenue and net profit trend from the financials, and you get a much more honest picture of the business than the listing description alone.