How do you go about forecasting the number of page visits for a new website?

Doing forecasting for financial purposes, to estimate ad revenue from page views. How would you go about predicting how many hits your new website is going to get every month?

It's tough -- with every breakout success story, there's always a website that hardly gets any traffic in the same niche. Unless you know the marketing strategies of your competitors and plan to do the same, it is even hard to forecast your traffic based on what others are getting.

My suggestion is:

Make a list of the marketing strategies you will do in a month, and set a realistic target traffic that you need for that. For example:

Banner advertising = target traffic of 10,000 uniques per month (then make a list of sites where you can do banner advertising and you think that you can get this amount of visitor -- and even then, the response rate also depends on the effectiveness of your banner ad so if your ad is crap, you won't get that muc)

Pay per click = go to Google Adwords and estimate the amount of traffic you can get for X amount of budget per month

Press releases = make a list of where you will send a press release, and estimate how many you can get for that campaign

Viral campaigns = how are you going to make sure that people talk about your site, share the site to others

Content development = how fast can you create pages for your site with quality and unique content with each page hopefully to bring in organic traffic from the search engines

Link building strategy = how many links a month can you give to your site

You can estimate your site's traffic by determining the ways you will actually do to get traffic. The worst mistake you can make is to put up a website -- and think that people will actually flock to it. Make your estimates based on the effort you will put on your site.

I would benchmark it to other sites at similar stages of development. But the range of outcomes will be rather large.

This is very nearly impossible to do. There are too many external variables, such as speed of organic indexing, social media growth of the site, link building success, etc. Competitive traffic, number of paid search ads on your keyphrases and all of this play into it.

This is why many new sites use paid search to shore up traffic levels and meet commitments whilst they work on their organic search numbers.

One thing you can do is ask other sites that are similar in structure yet non-competitive. Many web site owners are happy to share some data with you. Send them a nice Christmas card.

One trick... often a competitor's site will leave their stats folder unprotected. You can do www.competitorsite.com/stat or /webstats....etc. and get a sneak peek at their inner workings. But this is a long shot....and it still doesn't tell you how long it will take for you to achieve similar results.

It may be possible to use some of the paid-search traffic estimation tools to get an idea of "relative" traffic - but these numbers are really hard to apply in a "hard" way...

The rest is purely an academic brainstorm:

If you have confidence of being able to dominate search results pages, you could do this... it would let you possibly get close.

a) create a long-tail list of keywords for your site - basically start with the words you want to optimize for and create every combination you can think of.
b) add those to google search network pay-per-click advertising in an adgroup.... do EXACT MATCH keywords.
c) create ads and keep all ads on page 1 all the time.
d) take the impressions count for a given period and multiply it by known click-factors. For example.. 15% will click on #1, 11% on position 2...etc.
c) that will give you a rough visitor count on the organic search side of Google ... ASSUMING you get certain search positions and ASSUMING you did a good job on your long tail.

then... lastly, you could spreadsheet out the various positions... so this is how many home page visits we'd get if #1, #2, #3, and so on. This is brutally rough.

Scott Clark
Web Marketing Expert

I dont think its possible unless you can find someone with the same topic and get that confidital information from them

This is virtually impossible. I would be like taking a room filled with attorney's and trying to predict how many winning cases there will be over the next 12 months. There are many variables that are out of everyones hands. if you currently have statistical information on your website you might be able to put some figures together but at the end of the day this will be very difficult.

http://www.brickmarketing.com
100% USA Based Website Marketing Firm

You are going to have to let it run for a month or two, and go from there. You certainly should be doubling your page views every month for the first few months, if not you are not doing enough marketing.

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