I was having a review of the wonderful sales pacing dash and thinking about targets and forecast.
I'm wondering if/how people have gone about forecasting a final position based on prior performances and what they used in formulas.
eg:
I was keen to play with sames pacing based on an adjusted forecast target.
Can you tell I'm keen for v16 and predictive modeling?
I've been poking around with Forecasting in Analytics now that we're on 15.2.35. Mystic Aquarium is largely seasonal- we have year-round traffic, but July - Labor Day is by far our busiest time. Is there a way to get Analytics to respect this?If we're looking at January through July, the projection will naturally be ' this is trending upward'. However, that projection doesn't know 'Mystic's summer is always higher than it's winters' , or 'Mystic's Fall and winter are always less than its summer', so it won't be able to build that into it's modeling. Given that, how can I use the forecasting in a useful manner?
For instance, right now, even when looking at all of our Admission attendance data, it's projecting that mid-September and October will be steady at ~2.5k per day. Last year, we averaged less than half of that for our September/October months. Is there a usable way for us to leverage forecasting if the models can't be told 'summer high, winter low'?
The forecasting concept you are looking for is "seasonality." Brian might be correct in that increasing the window of time over multiple years might help it pick up on the needed seasonality aspect of the forecasting. We haven't upgraded yet to that yet, so I can't speak to how you would get it to show in Analytics.