In mid-October Clive asked me to forecast what I thought our search traffic would be by the end of the year. It had only taken six weeks for searches containing “absolute” to overtake those containing “virgin” so how high would it climb over the next eleven weeks?

This wasn’t the most robust of forecasts. I didn’t spend hours agonising over the figures or building complex regression models. Instead, I picked a reasonable number and drew a line to it. The heavy lines are the actual figues and the thin lines are the forecasts.

Searches not containing either “absolute” or “virgin” weren’t going to move much as the site’s editorial direction wasn’t really changing. I figured 35% was a reasonable level based on history. Searches containing “virgin” would continue to drop so I thought 5% was likely by the end of the year. That left 60% for “absolute” searches and the good news is we are on target to get there.

It took six weeks for “absolute” to get ahead of “virgin”, twelve weeks for “absolute” to get above 50% and probably, after only 18 weeks, we will reach our 60% target.