The Anvil
Subscribe
Archives
🎶All I Want for Christmas Reeviieeeeew🎶
January 6, 2022
Happy New Year Everyone! And thank you all for your support during 2021 - here’s to an excellent 2022. On November 9th 2021 I made a forecast for the number...
Optimising the timing of paid media spend
December 9, 2021
What is the best way of splitting a media budget across the year? Two weeks ago I wrote an introduction to forecasting paid media; in this post I will...
All I Overfitting for Overfitting is Overfitting
November 25, 2021
A couple of weeks ago I used Forecast Forge to build a forecast for the number of pageviews of the “All I Want for Christmas is You” wikipedia page in the...
Forecasting for Paid Media
November 17, 2021
Morning Everybody! PPC and Google Ads is where I first started in my career so it has a special place in my heart. I have a million ideas on how forecasting...
All I Want for Christmas is You
November 9, 2021
Every year someone notices Google Trends rising for “All I Want for Christmas is You”. It signals the start of the Christmas period for some. How high will...
3 Tips for More Sensitive Before/After Tests
October 8, 2021
Hi All, Last week I wrote about how you can use a forecast to measure the impact of a some kind of change (e.g. Google rewriting your title tags in the...
Weather Data and Measuring Title Tag Changes
September 29, 2021
After a bit of a Summer hiatus the gears are starting to turn here are Forecast Forge towers again. It’s September, I have new pencil case and I’m feeling...
How good will your forecast be?
June 28, 2021
Hi All, It’s been a long time - I’ve been busy with client work and other non-Forecast Forge projects. This email contains two things: A case study on...
Ideas and questions after #PPCChat
April 16, 2021
Morning all, happy Friday! There is a post below going into some more depth with some questions and ideas that came out of #PPCChat on Tuesday. I also have a...
How often should you update a forecast
March 22, 2021
Evening all, I hope you like screenshots of spreadsheets… How often should you be updating forecasts or making new ones? The answer depends on what you mean...
The Forecast Forge Bet and Six Month Update
March 5, 2021
Earlier this week I tweeted the below as part of another conversation My hypothesis with @ForecastForge is that people can make better forecasts using a...
A new case study and working with monthly data
February 26, 2021
A Friday forecasting update for you all this week! It is another double header with two pieces of content: A case study with Ian Daniels (@surfpunkian on...
Case Study: Forecasting Ecommerce Revenue
February 17, 2021
Morning all, Two pieces of content in one email for you today. One of them is a bit esoteric so I didn't want to send it in an email by itself. A case study...
Anomaly Detection and Conference Round Up
February 1, 2021
Happy February everyone, Last month was an unusually social one for me with two virtual events. First was a long term favourite of mine; MeasureCamp. And...
Scheduled Forecasts and Data Studio Import
January 25, 2021
Because Forecast Forge works as part of Google Sheets you can include Forecast Forge forecasts in your Data Studio reports. And with addons like the official...
Broken Machine Learning & Substitute Day Bank Holidays
January 7, 2021
Happy New Year everyone, First, a very quick bit of housekeeping; later this month I intend to change the Forecast Forge plans/pricing. The cheapest plan...
A Workflow for Forecasting
December 2, 2020
Here is how I make forecasts using Forecast Forge. There are a lot of similarities with how forecasting is done by data scientists so some of this will be...
Forecasting Lockdowns
November 23, 2020
A Covid-19 vaccination is now clearly visible on the horizon but there are still significant uncertainties about when exactly this will become available and...
Cumulative Forecasts and Measuring Impact
November 4, 2020
If you have a really good forecasting model that has, historically, produced good results then you can use it to estimate the effect of a change. For...
Extending Prophet for Fun and Profit - Part 2
October 28, 2020
This is part of a series on extending the Prophet forecasting model so that it can do other things. These posts are extremely technical in nature; almost at...
Extending Prophet for fun and profit - part 1
October 19, 2020
Understanding the original implementation Prophet is a general purpose forecast algorithm developed by Facebook. It is the main algorithm used behind the...
Using the sidebar
October 5, 2020
This will just be a short email explaining how to use the sidebar for making forecasts as an alternative to the FORGE_FORECAST custom function. You can watch...
Forecasting and SEO algorithm updates
September 21, 2020
I recently read a very interesting post from Patrick Stox on the Ahrefs blog. Since it concerns itself with SEO forecasting I wanted to write something...
Post-Bank Holiday Update
September 1, 2020
This last week has been all about usability. I have tried to improve the error messages so that when the inputs are bad or something else goes wrong you have...
Improving CausalImpact with a BSTS custom forecast
August 26, 2020
CausalImpact is an R package that helps analyse the causal effect of an event on a metric of interest. It is often used by media analysts trying to pinpoint...