Website traffic estimation: My excel forecasting model (Part 2)

Due to the number of inquiries after my first posting "Website traffic estimation: is there..." I've decided to share my forecasting excel model.

To download: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7668443/Traffic-Estimation-Model-1

Traffic Estimation Model 1 - Upload a Document to Scribd

IMPORTANT

1) Linear Function: y = 8E+09x + 49771
2) 2nd degree polinomic function: y = -1E+13x2 + 1E+10x - 3272,2
3) For the part of the curve that corresponds to websites with an Alexa traffic rank below 100.000, the function used is an average of the polinomic and linear functions

Two functions are used to calculate traffic. This could be upgraded, corrected and improved with more data points or sources of datapoints.

Please if you know any public source of reliable data of historic data on traffic, or have any comments email me at pedroneiraf@gmail.com

4) Cells with yellow background ARE NOT Alexa's 3 month average reach. This input was distorted, so before inputing the data directly from Alexa, it has to be corrected
5) The way in which this data is "corrected" is by a simple cross-multiplication aproximation to the nearest upper value in the list (the closest upper white cell).
6) This function will not work well for recently created websites.
7) This material is for non-commercial use only. Any usage of these functions or part of this excel sheet should quote the source.


The results I've got so far with this function have an average error of 7%, although it has to be said that in some cases, the error might be up to 40%. It has worked for me so far 80% of the time with an error of less than 15%, which is more than acceptable considdering the errors wound in other tools like the web Traffic Estimate. If you have a website and know your numbers, just compare and see the difference.

Please, this model is just a starting point, that needs to be upgraded, corrected and improved with all your comments.... Any suggestions ???

Copyright MBA Internet Marketing Manager

Website Traffic Estimation: Is there really a reliable tool to estimate traffic??

In the last couple of months I've been working on prospecting the Latin American market for Real Estate WebPortals. In my research I've found that at some point I needed to forecast traffic (number of unique users per month) in each of the studied countries in order to have at least an approximation of the revenue income from Advertising.
In my research I did not find what I was looking for: a simple tool or website where if you pasted the URL it gives you an estimate of monthly visits/users or page views. The only website that does this kind of estimation is www.trafficestimate.com however, after extesive comparison of its results and real data that I managed to get, I have to say that the error margin of this site is huge. The variability of the estimates (compared to real data) that this website has in its results is so big that I cannot recommend it for traffic estimations or traffic forecasting.

Although I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for to accurate predict traffic, In the search process I found some interesting tools that can be useful:

• Google Insights Search: Very interesting tool. It does not provide the actual number of users or visits, but does provide information regarding search volume of any keyword. You can see tendencies in search volumes and compare relative search volumes between different keywords.
• Alexa.com: This is the oldest and most comprehensive webtraffic statistics website available for free use. Even though it's not statistically accurate (Its sampling method is not representative) is the closest we have to an overall traffic ranking system . It tends to work pretty well with websites with a "Traffic Rank" higher than 100.000.
• Ranking.com: Provides information in a very similar way than Alexa.com does: Traffic Rankings, Number of users per Million, trend graphs, etc.
  

Given that there wasn't such a tool, I decided to creat one myself and I developed an Excel Model to predict website Traffic for any site. The model I came up with is an statistical function (the average of a linear function with a 2nd degree polinomic function) and predicts the number of users based on Alexa's reach. This model, with links real stats (past real number of users of selected websites) to estimate users of any website, based on its reach. In some cases, because Alexa's information is not accurate always, the "Reach" has to be "translated" into a relevan number before being plugged into the Excel function.
Although it still needs a lot of work, so far the average estimation error is around 7%, which is much better than the other tools I managed to find online.
I can forward the Excel file on request and for free, just in exchange of data to help me build a better and more accurate function.

See part 2 of this post in Website traffic estimation: My excel model

Copyright MBA Internet Marketing Manager