What Google Analytics Data to Share with Potential Website Buyer

[emerald]

Hi Mozzers,
We have contacted our competitors to let them know we would like to sell our website (domain and all content).

One of them has asked for Google Analytics data. Which parts of this and how is this data best shared in such a case?

As this is the opening of offers, I'm assuming some kind of PDF export with a summary of some Analytics data is sufficient to see who is serious. Then for those who are serious more data could be shared. Or is it ever ok to share your full Analytics with a competitor?

Would love to hear what data and best practises are used to share this kind of information.

Thank you.

[GlobeRunner]

Initially, I would get the competitor to sign an NDA so that there aren't any issues later. It really doesn't matter how much you're going to sell the website and domain name for, you want to protect yourself in the future.

Initially, I would point them to SEMrush.com for data, as that typically has as much as someone would need. And, it's a third party offering the data. As for Google Analytics access, I wouldn't give them Analytics access at first, I would ask them what data they are looking for. You can typically give them a PDF that shows the past year of page views, showing the "monthly" view. I also would share with them the referral sources, so that they understand that the site isn't gaming the page view numbers.

[JordanLowry]

I think it depends on how much you are trying to sell your website for. I think as a frist step it would be nice to see traffic to the website year over year along with where that traffic is coming from. So for example, you could pull some aggregate data of a comparison of YoY traffic then have an overall break down of traffic sources for the last year or 6 months. In addition, to that data if it was me I would like to see engagement metrics like avg. session duration and bounce rate. It does no one any good if you can drive a lot of traffic but people are bouncing from the site and avg. session duration is very low. I am assuming they would like to see people are coming to the site and engaging with it appropriately. I would also include a breakdown of where website traffic is coming from geographically along with pageviews for each region. I think segmenting this out by Country would be appropriate if it is an international website however if you only deal with people locally I would just segment by state or region.

If you were going to hold off on showing revenue and financials then I would recommend pulling some backlink data from SEM Rush or Ahrefs. Also, I would consider showing some overall rank data from the site as well if you are actively tracking keyword ranking and positioning.

Then if they are serious I would consider going into Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and pull some data on the overall health of the website such as, the number of pages indexed, search analytics data like top queries or pages. At this point, I would show financial data and overall revenue of the website.

As a point of reference, I know Flippa lets you buy and sell websites. You can head over to their platform and navigate to the 'Buy' section of the site and see what sort of data other people are openly sharing about their websites.

Hope this helps let me know if you have anymore questions.