4 Crucial Components to Forecasting Your Organic Traffic

Organic traffic in web traffic is basically all the traffic that you get from unpaid for listing at search engines and directories. This kind of traffic can be created by including your website or blog onto directories, search engines, guides and award sites. Though hard to gather, it forms one of the easiest ways of getting easy traffic to your site without having to do any real time investments.

By forecasting your organic traffic, you have the option of making informed decisions, having better goals to work with, overall team efficiency improvement and the realization of more income per unit time. To ensure that you fully reap of these benefits, there are some things that you must consider in a bid to streamline your organic traffic acquisition campaigns.

4 Crucial Components to Forecasting Your Organic Traffic

Asses the Accuracy of Your Data and Its Outliers

This is important if you are to make valid conclusion from your data. Though most of the data available to you is bound to be valid, there is the question of how time bound it is. By ensuring that you are working with the most recent of the values in your analysis, you stand a chance of making projections that are more informed than it would be the case if you used ancient data.

Analyse the Outliers and Make Decisions

Having outliers in any set of data is quite normal. The real question becomes; should you act on the spike or should you ignore it? The decision on this matter does not solely lie in the set of data you have. By chipping in the knowledge, you have on the field, you can decide on whether you will consider the spike or ignore it.

By ignoring the spike, you assume that it is in no way important to your organic traffic hence you are free to adjust it to the position you think it should be at- under normal circumstances. Caution should be taken when making such decisions since they can form the basis of many errors in your projections. Only assume what you are almost sure has been a once in a lifetime occurrence.

Create a Base For Your Forecast

The next thing after smoothing out your curve would e creating a foundation on which your forecast will lie. Ideally, this should be a straight line cutting through the middle of your data. This can be achieved by calculating the mean point for every data and using it to create the forecast base. Some analysis tools, like for instance Excel have inbuilt formulas that will help you to easily come up with this value without breaking any sweat.

By using historical data, Excel can print out a forecast that bases on the data. It creates a graph sloping from the starting point to the end. The choice of your base forecast is the dependent on the data you are using. You can choose either the start or the end to be your starting point to making an accurate projection.

Adding Imported Bits and Pieces to Make Sense of the Data

Up to this point, you will have acquired all the insight you need from the data. To make the complete forecast, you need to liaise it with information about you operations and trends in the market to come up with projections about how the future will be. Some information that might come in handy in making projections include introduction of innovations that give you advantage over your competitor or failures and mistakes on your competitor’s side.