This is the first of what I hope are a few posts to help people take control of their blog or website earnings to generate some interesting statistics about where their blog revenue may be in the future, metrics about where their earnings currently are, and information on how to track true success metrics on your blog to drive future revenue.
This is a somewhat technical tutorial so please leave a comment if you have questions or if I’ve made a mistake! (I’ll suppress your comment if you want me to, its just the simplest way to make sure I get it and respond to it!).
How to predict future Google AdSense revenues on your blog using Microsoft Excel’s FORECAST function:
- Generate an advanced Adsense report using “Aggregate” as the report type and “All Time” as the date range
- Once the report is generated, click the in the upper right of the generated report that says “CSV”
- Open the CSV file in Excel
- Save the file as an xls file
- Insert a column in front of the first “date” column
- In cell A1, enter 0
- In cell A2 (first row with data), enter “=A1+1″ and press enter (that should give you a 1
- Highlight cell A2 and choose “Edit” -> “Copy”
- Highlight all the cells in the “A” column after A2 and go to “Edit”->”Paste” to paste in the formula
- You should now have a column of incremented numbers up to the last value in your “A” column
- Find an empty cell to the right of your data where you’d like to paste the Excel forecast data
- Lets assume your “All Time” data includes 365 days worth of data (a full year)
- To figure out how much money you’ll likely be making a year from now, enter the following in the empty cell: “=FORECAST(730, G2:G366, A2:A366)” where “730″ is 2 years out (365 days/year * 2), “G2:G366″ is the data range that includes your earnings for each day of the year and “A2:A366″ is the data range that includes the day number.
What this exercise does is basically tell excel to take the first 365 days of earnings you have in column G and forecast what that number will be on day 730.
You can vary the formula to predict earnings next month, 3 months from now or even several years from now if you’d like by changing the value from “700″ in the formula to x number of days past the end of your data set. To see the earnings for a month from now, if you have 365 days of data in the report, choose “395″ as the first value in the forecast function (30 days past the end of your data set, 365).
Keep in mind the projections are basically average estimates. I hope you’ve found this helpful and, again, please leave a comment if you have feedback or have questions on the process!
on Feb 28th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Hello webmaster , I like a lot your blog post expecially the article for adsense revenue and your post regarding Predicting future AdSense revenue with Excel , it looks very interesting. Nice to share it with us. I found you on Ask Jeeves while searching for adsense revenue . I just Digged it on Thursday so will notice also an increase of blog traffic in exchange.