Forecasting a single line item

 

Here, for example, is a projection of Organic Visits to the SurvivalWare website.  Organic visits occur when someone uses a search engine to find our website (as opposed to a referral, a paid click, or direct entry of our URL).  We’ve been using Google Analytics since February 2007 to track traffic to the website, so we have 15 months of data.  This is not enough history to do a seasonal forecast, and I am not sure it is seasonal anyway.

 

Looking at the trend is easy as 1-2-3:

 

 

 

 

 

Total Organic visits cannot be forecast directly because it is a calculated row.  We can tell it is calculated because it has a yellow background, and we cannot type a number in one of the yellow cells.  What we can do is forecast the three rows that make it up all at once.

 

So we mark the three rows - Google, Yahoo, and Other – and click the Forecast Icon .