TagsForesight can provoke a handful of outcomes. It can dictate your future or help you calibrate your approach. In essence, knowing the future could help you or hurt you depending on your measurement of reason.
A common misconception is that a prediction is identical to a forecast. This perception isn’t completely incorrect, but the idea of a prediction can become confusing and misrepresented when taken out of context.
Unlike the gypsy who can magically predict your true love story with only a quick glimpse of your palm, Levers looks much deeper. The Levers predictive analytics method uses all your historical data to give you a better idea of where you’re headed. In other words, there are prerequisites to your envisaged “love story.”
Levers recommends a minimum three months (90 days) of properly tracked performance marketing data prior to ordering forecasts or testing simulations. Wonder why? In order to accurately guide you towards the right direction, Levers needs the ability to look at your past data. The data is then processed into an accurate forecast based on how your website has performed.
Forecast Vs. Prediction. What’s the difference?
The two words are certainly synonymous to one another, but exist equally apart.
A prediction is most often centered around the idea of an outcome based on deductive logic or beliefs rather than the approach.
If you’re running an ecommerce business now, it’s reasonable to predict you will have more traffic while approaching the holiday season. You could even go far enough to say you will make more money because of this sudden surge in traffic to your site. None of these predictions are necessarily wrong, but the scope and foundation of its reason doesn’t go far beyond your intuition and logic – similar to the palm-reading gypsy you encountered.
A forecast is a means to validating a prediction based on an analysis of varying factors and patterns, showing you how you got to this future logic or belief. Hence the usage of a forecast in lieu of a prediction, within the world of business information.
Using the same example above but with forecasting: You’re running the same business approaching the same holiday season. You can still predict your site will get more sales and traffic over the course of the holidays, but this time you also take into account your quantitative marketing data, or the data encompassing said logic. You now see that weekdays generate more revenue than weekends, how long the site’s holiday season lasts and even calculate how much more money you could make during this season compared to the rest of the year. These findings and calculations from your site’s past create a solid, data-driven bedrock for your initial prediction, justifying its credibility and molding it into a forecast.
Levers creates your forecast by mathematically analyzing your performance marketing data and its past patterns. It gives you the ability to both analyze forecasts based on your historical data and simulate changes within these forecasts. With a properly tracked dataset and a powerful, mathematically driven forecasting engine, you can get a head start on the future.
If you are unsure if your data is tracking properly in analytics, you can always reach out for help at support@leve.rs. Your forecast is only as accurate as the data that is used to create it!
References
[1] THE PREDICTION PARADOX, November 2013.