Forecasting is a topic most marketers prefer to ignore, and if they are forced to engage with it, substitute a generic benchmark that they’d be hard-pressed to fall short of attaining. As we enter a macroeconomic tightening cycle, forecasting will become more important — and the marketers who do it well will have an unfair advantage over the competition. In this session, Sam has looked at hundreds (probably thousands) of ad accounts spanning just about every vertical. In this session he will explore with you what makes a remarkable forecast, and how you can take the approach, strategies and formulas used by some of the world’s top forecasters, and put them to work for you. This includes your Forecasting Strategy (we’ll discuss cohort-based forecasts, Bayesian forecasts, and regression-based forecasts); how to deal with randomness + luck by providing three model types that can handle these complications in statistically-accepted ways; strategies for linking platform metrics to business metrics and how to unlock the next tiers of performance by integrating forecasts into reporting + testing data.