Overview

On your websites, you may have exceptional (temporary) traffic increases or decreases. For instance, traffic may decrease significantly during the Christmas holidays; conversely, traffic may increase during an election period.

Equativ's forecast cannot "know" about such exceptional traffic increases/decreases. It will always assume that the traffic trend will continue as it did in the past.

Here, Equativ's feature data injection comes into play. It allows you to force the forecast to use custom traffic data. 

Setting up a data injection

• Click on Inventory
• Click on Forecast data injection under More options
• Under Available placements, select the websites/pages/packs, for which you want to apply the data injection and move them to the right using the blue arrow icon
• Select the Start date end the End date during which the data injection should be used
• For Type select Percentage or Raw value
  • Percentage: Use percentage values greater or less than 100%. The forecast will apply this percentage to the number of page views (page impressions) of the selected placements; example: if you enter 120% for a website with 1 million page views, the forecast will assume that the website will have 1.2 million page views (during the timeframe of the data injection) and will calculate accordingly
  • Raw value: You can also use a raw (absolute) number of page views. Keep in mind that this value is for the entire timeframe of the data injection. The raw value entered here will replace the value calculated by the Forecast for the number of page views.
• Add a comment if needed
• Click Save

On the History tab, you get an overview of existing data injections. You can also edit or delete data injections.You have to wait until the next day, until newly created data injections or changes to existing data injections will take effect. This applies to both the premium and the free version of the forecast. 

Best practices

Overlapping data injections

If there are multiple data injections with overlapping criteria (overlapping timeframe, overlapping websites/pages/packs), the most recently edited (or created) data injection will apply.We strongly recommend to avoid overlapping criteria. This may lead to behaviors difficult to analyze and fix. The best practice is to split the data injections into multiple data injections without overlaps.

Updating data injections

If your data injection uses percentage values, please check if the percentages you chose were correct a few days after the data injection's start date. If you detect that the actual traffic is much higher or lower than the percentages you defined in the data injection, you should update the percentages. If you leave the data injection unchanged, you risk that the forecast interprets the data injection as a global trend rather than an exceptional (temporary) traffic increase/decrease.