Forecasting Advertisment Profit and Impressions 
Forecasting will always be hit or miss with web sites. It has always been said in Industrial Engineering that your forecasts will always be wrong. If they are correct, someone is cheating. Forecasting, however, is not useless. It has countless benefits to you and your web site. Forecasting is used for cost analysis, project feasibility, or even for pure curiosity. It never hurts to be ahead of the game (or prepared, at least). As easy as it is to read a trendline, there will always be much variability between what you calculate and your actual result. I created the following program to minimize the margin of error in calculating potential visitors and income to your web site. To spare you of the boring details of the (fairly simple) equations I used, let's go over what you need to know to use this.
Period - The "Period" represents any consistent time period, whether it is consecutive weeks, months, or even years. I would discourage anyone who wants to set the Period values in consecutive days. Individual days tend to have too much variability to accurately measure.
Ad Impressions - This represents the amount of times people see your ads. If you are using Adsense, you will know how to access this value. However, if you are not using Adsense, just use the amount of visits you have for each page. If you have multiple ads per page, make sure you factor in those hits, too.
Average CTR - CTR means Click-Through-Rate. Again, Adsense has this value given to you. If you do not know this value, take the Impressions value and divide it into how many clicks your ads receive. Then multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.
Average IPC - IPC means Income-Per-Click.
The result will be a forecast for the next two periods. Again, it will not be 100% correct - however, it should give you a good idea as to what you can expect in the future.
Note that it is not necessary to fill in the 'Average CTR' and 'Average IPC' fields to receive an Impressions forecast.
Jim Gordon
6/20/07
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