Estimating Attendence

Question

I am trying to estimate attendance at events. What I have is daily/weekly ticket sales numbers. The goal is to analyze the ticket sales each day and estimate where we might be at by the day of the event.

We have hundreds of events so we can compare events against each other.

Google Spreadsheets has a function called trend, but I do know how to begin. :)

lets say the following are sales by day

3 - 60 days before concert 2 - 59 days before concert 4 - 58 7 - 57 5 - 56 8 - 55 3 - 54 10 - 53 3 - 52 6 - 51 6 - 50 3 - 49 11 - 48 5 - 47 etc etc etc

If I had 60 of these numbers is there a way to estimate sales

Answer 1

Using the function TREND in Google Spreadsheet makes sense, if you expect approximately linear dependence of sales volume on day. (I rather suspect it will not be linear, with a spike shortly before the event, and other spikes around promotional activities. Or maybe sales will stagnate after the avid fans got their tickets.)

On the screenshot below, I entered the number of days in the A column (using A3=A2-1 and so on), and sales in the B column as far as they are known. In the cell below the last known sales figure, enter the TREND function. The result:

Then sum all the values in the B column to predict total sales. I got the projection of $647$ tickets sold. This is the chart of A-B columns (it should be read from right to left, as the number of days until the event decreases):