Trendline - Excel

[Cuc Tu]

I'm trying to show the growth in Web traffic on our site and Excel's trendline is not showing me what I want.

The goal is to set a benchmark and then achieve 5% growth by end of year. The benchmark is the traffic for the month of May. I have copied the number of page views for each month below, along with a percentage growth calculation.

May 93 0.00%
June 108 16.13%
July 94 1.08%
August 175 88.17%
September 116 24.73%
October 93 0.00%
November 77 -17.20%
December 126 35.48%
January 109 17.20%

[Cuc Tu]

First, I plotted the total page views per month as a bar chart for the months of June through January. A linear trendline is negative. The same if I include May. I can set an intercept of 93 (the starting benchmark) and that results in a positive slope, but I'm not sure that is accurate.

Second, I plotted the percentage growth and had the same type of results - setting an intercept of 0 for May results in a positive slope. I'm again not sure that is the correct representation.

Now, if I average the percentage growth for each month, excluding May, then I get an average of 20.7%

So, I'm wondering which is the best way to present the results?