Last updated May 2023
Use our inventory forecaster to predict your likeliest results next month, as well as what likely scenarios look like. (It also works with revenue).
If your results are increasing, expect them to keep going up. If they are decreasing, expect them to keep going down.
Inventory Forecasting For Publishers
As a website owner, you will, of course, be very interested in inventory forecasting. That is estimating future levels of adverts available to sell so you can work out much money you will be able to make from your site via online advertising.
This process is, unfortunately, not an exact science, as you are attempting to predict the future.
However, our inventory forecaster shows you the most likely result, as well as a range of thresholds that your results will likely fall within.
The middle results are where you can be fairly certain your results will fall unless you have an unusual month.
Better Forecasting
If you want better inventory forecasts, you will need to keep track of all your relevant data. This includes things like:
- ad impressions
- marketing spend
- channel growth
- page count growth
- seasonal user count changes.
If you track this over a long period, you could potentially try to work out a formula that works for you.
We would generally not recommend doing this, however. The benefit you receive will likely be outweighed by the time it takes. This is because this is a huge ongoing project, but inventory levels change only slightly (and inconsistently) over time.
If you want to know what next month is going to look like, check out recent trends and apply them to last month. Likely, you’ll not be far off. Or at least no further off than a complicated, time-consuming model.
Many people and companies have tried many complicated and convoluted ways to make their inventory forecasting more accurate. None have succeeded in any major way. Unless you have a magic link to the future, we recommend you don’t get sucked into trying to outdo them either.
Top Tip: If you want to try to do this in Excel, we recommend the forecast.ets function.
It’s a bit complicated and no more accurate than the above, but still useful.
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