Estimating / forecasting web traffic

I'm trying to forecast ad revenue on a site that doesn't yet exist. I'd like to run parallel forecasts for CPM (cost per thousand impression) and CPC (cost per click) models.

[b5b0e5ff373]For the CPM model, I'm trying to estimate the following[/b5b0e5ff373]
(Monthly unique visitors li Average monthly visits per user li Average page views per visit) = Total page views per month / (1000 li CPM) = Average revenue per month

[b5b0e5ff373]For the CPC model, I'm trying to estimate the following[/b5b0e5ff373]
(Unique users / day li average ad views per day per unique user li click-through ratio li average click value li 30) = Average revenue per month

Can anyone recommend resources for benchmarking any of these variables? Alexa for monthly unique visitors, for example?

please let me know if you figure this out because if you do you will negate millions of dollars of consulting done every month )

[quote2166a00bb4="Admin"]please let me know if you figure this out because if you do you will negate millions of dollars of consulting done every month )[/quote2166a00bb4]

So is it generally understood then that predicting or estimating web traffic is basically impossible? Are usage stats like these only accessible to webmasters?

I have no experience as a webmaster, but, at a minimum, I need to have not-batshit-crazy projections for monthly ad revenue based on assumptions about traffic.

+10 karma to anybody with a web site who tells me

-The site's URL;
-How many daily/monthly unique visitors the site receives; and
-How many pages views per visit.

The historical statistics aren't hard to come by if you have proper access to the site, i.e. webmaster or granted privilege by the webmaster. Most websites gather stats like these and there are any number of tools used to crunch and report those numbers.

I think what Tyler is referring to is the prediction side of your question. With enough history you can establish trends and make projections based on those trends, and that's about it. Then all it takes is for somebody to SlashDot the site and there go all those projections. lol Or if the sites depends on a certain amount of international traffic, particularly from countries like China or those in the Middle East where they filter their citizens' site access on a whim, you could suddenly find large chunks of your audience blocked out.

But aside from those exceptional situations, if you have enough history to establish a trend, you should be able to somewhat predict the likelyhood of future traffic.

Unfortunately I can't be much specific help, as that's an area of site administration that has never interested me, nor have I had been required to deal with. Therefore I have no hands-on experience to offer you.

[quotec12672e491="dmorris68"]Unfortunately I can't be much specific help, as that's an area of site administration that has never interested me, nor have I had been required to deal with. Therefore I have no hands-on experience to offer you.[/quotec12672e491]

+3 karma for making an attempt

I can't get the historical statistics for the site in question, because it doesn't exist.

I really just need to have a reasonable, conservative estimate of what kind of monthly traffic I would need to hit certain revenue milestones consistently. So anybody with the historical traffic trends is still encouraged to throw me a bone.

Well, having a been a few days since I read your original post, I totally forgot that the site doesn't exist yet. Duh.

That just makes it even more "black magic" than projecting based on history. Without a history you can't possibly predict how much traffic the site will get. Comparing to other webmaster's efforts won't be very meaningful unless their site happens to be about the same thing, and even then it's only barely relevant due to so many other factors.

I think [b2e773a8182]that's[/b2e773a8182] what Tyler was referring to, actually. Imagine the money you could make if you could semi-accurately tell a company how much ad revenue their site would generate, before it ever existed. D

[quoteef9c4c24de="dmorris68"]Well, having a been a few days since I read your original post, I totally forgot that the site doesn't exist yet. Duh.

That just makes it even more "black magic" than projecting based on history. Without a history you can't possibly predict how much traffic the site will get. Comparing to other webmaster's efforts won't be very meaningful unless their site happens to be about the same thing, and even then it's only barely relevant due to so many other factors.

I think [bef9c4c24de]that's[/bef9c4c24de] what Tyler was referring to, actually. Imagine the money you could make if you could semi-accurately tell a company how much ad revenue their site would generate, before it ever existed. D[/quoteef9c4c24de]

Well I'm gettin' pretty close here. Maybe I'll drop the original plan and start in on that. D

yeah, there are [i83ff7a34bc]so many[/i83ff7a34bc] variables involved that predicting with anything resembling accuracy is basically impossible.

even with comparable historical data, ad revenue follows some fucked up formula (again due to the large number of variables) that nobody understands so it would be fruitless to attempt this. plus higher traffic does not necessarily correlate to higher ad revenue (for example, if a bunch of fipg regulars suddenly start viewing 2x as many forum posts (this is assuming i had some kind of ad running), my revenue would probably not go up even on a cpm model because impressions are treated as per-user per-24-hours, typically