Have you ever wondered:

• How fast can my website grow?
• How long will it take to make good money on traffic?
• What are the most important factors for website traffic growth?
• How much should I spend on website advertising?

Over my next few posts I’ll develop a practical method for modeling website traffic that can answer all of those questions, and more!

The web is barren of information on traffic prediction, maybe because it’s so challenging. The main problems are:

• It’s difficult to model the qualitative aspects of a site: quality of content, site appearance, navigation, domain name, etc.
• Visitors can arrive in different ways and for different reasons
• Small inputs can have a large effect (‘digg effect‘, viral content, etc.)

The number of unknown and unquantifiable variables makes accurate prediction impossible, especially in a site’s early life. But there are still benefits for trying, including:

• Insight regarding important parameters for site growth (should I advertise more, focus on loyalty, or encourage referrals?)
• Rapidly testing ‘what if’ scenarios (what if conversion rate is half the expected value?)
• Planning infrastructure (when will I approach my bandwidth limit?)
• Something to show investors

The Easy Way

Probably the easiest way to predict growth of a new website is to look at other sites. Find one that offers a similar product/service in the same market, and see how their traffic has grown (try Alexa or Google Trends for websites). For many small sites (ecommerce, online directories, blogs, etc.) it’s reasonable to assume that if you do what they did, you could get similar results. If you know what they’ve done in the way of advertising and link-building you’ll know how much effort is required to approach their traffic level.

This approach takes little thought and no math, but has two drawbacks:

• There may not be a comparable website
• It doesn’t help you understand the growth

In Part 2 I’ll review basic growth models and how to extrapolate your existing traffic!