Basics of Website Traffic Forecasting: Tools & Techniques

Forecasting is a crucial tool to predict how your website is growing and what traffic you may expect in the future. It’s common in multiple industries including marketing, finance and recruitment. Forecasting works by analysing historical traffic data, trends and patterns to predict what is going to happen in the future, helping to plan resources based on when the site is going to receive the highest traffic. There are multiple aspects that go into a forecast, but two of the key components are trends and seasonality.

Basics of Trends

In forecasting, trends represent the direction in a dataset over time. For example, is a site gaining more traffic over time or slowly losing traffic month over month? Trends are crucial in forecasting as they reveal the underlying direction the data is moving over time whether that is increasing, decreasing or remaining stable. Understanding trends helps the forecast filter out short term fluctuations in traffic while recognising long term patterns, making the forecast more accurate.  

Example of a Positive Trend:

Example of a Negative Trend:

Basics of Seasonality

Seasonality is another key component of forecasting and is the process of recognising recurring patterns that occur in data at regular intervals whether that is hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Seasonality is especially common on eCommerce and retail websites. Seasonality is important for increased accuracy of forecasts because it will match the prediction to previous historical trends. For example, a toy shop receiving higher amounts of traffic during the holiday period or swimwear brands generating smaller volumes of traffic during the winter months.

High amounts of seasonality:

Basic Forecasting Machine Learning Models

There are so many different methods of forecasting ranging from simple methods to advanced more powerful tools.

Linear Regression is a simple approach to get started with forecasting. Linear Regression models a relationship between two variables so you can predict the future. It works well for simple linear trends with little seasonality. It can still be a great way to get a grip with the fundamentals.

Exponential Smoothing is a big step up and straight forward method of forecasting. Unlike linear regression it assigns a weighting to recent values and decreases a weighting on older values. This makes the forecast more accurate when taking into account recent performance. There are variations of the basic Exponential Smoothing method which account for seasonality. 

SARIMA Forecasting (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) is a power house of a method which accounts for trend and seasonal patterns. By tuning certain parameters, you can adapt it to multiple scenarios of data. It does take some expertise to configure effectively. 

Prophet, developed by Meta, is a versatile tool for forecasting. It specialises in business scenarios involving strong trends and seasonality. Prophet automatically handles holidays, outliers and missing data making it a go to tool for time series forecasting.

Each of these methods have their own niche and applications. Start with the basics of Linear Regression and develop as your data grows.

No-Code Forecasting Tools (Tableau & PowerBI)

There are multiple ways to use forecasting tools aside from the traditional programming languages like R and Python. 

Excel

There are multiple, built-in forecasting formulas in excel. To access Linear Regression you can use the =FORECAST.LINEAR() Function. You can also perform exponential smoothing with or without seasonality with FORECAST.ETS() or =FORECAST.ETS.SEASONALITY().

Tableau/Power BI

Tableau transforms forecasting in a visual, no-code experience, allowing the user to analyse data with built in models like linear regression and exponential smoothing. It allows you to show your forecasts in interactive dashboards. Similar to Tableau, Power BI offers forecasting tools through its no-code platform, allowing users to apply predictive models.Both of these platforms above allow the user a very seamless forecasting experience without the need for any code.

Benefits of Forecasting

Forecasting is a crucial tool for success especially for website traffic. Forecasting allows businesses to anticipate traffic, optimise resources and plan effectively. It helps set realistic growth goals and strive towards data driven decision making.

Ready to make your own data-driven decisions for the year ahead? Our search experts utilise forecasting throughout all our client campaigns, ensuring we effectively leverage every opportunity and maximise growth and profitability. 

For information on how we can do the same for you, get in touch with our eCommerce SEO team, today!