Quantcast.com Improves Your Web-Site Traffic Metrics
For some while now, about 2 years or so, there’s been a new resource for web marketeers and ad agencies alike: Quantcast.com.
Quantcast shows two kinds of site traffic measurements:
- Estimated traffic
- Metered traffic from cookies
They also provide an amazing amount of demographics on the real or estimated economics, ages, sex, family status, income, educational level, and so on of the site’s visitors. To see an example, visit their page for one of our own health related sites — Level1Diet.com. You’ll notice that they link you to dozens of ’similar sites’ that have a similar audience profile by demographics, psychographics, etc.
This is remarkable information. You won’t find such detailed visitor profile info on any public advertising metrics site. In fact until recently, you would have had to pay online data and marketing research companies thousands of dollars just to get access to similar data. This ‘free access’ is amazing… and extremely useful.
Quantcast Marketing Info is Used For:
- Advertisers — media buyers and ad agencies, who want to know about the sites where they buy banners, links or other ads.
- Ad-accepting sites or the ‘new media’ companies themselves, who want to know about the incomes, education, and other habits of their visitor traffic.
- Competing sites, who want to know about the traffic and profiles of their competitors… for marketing purposes.
The New Improved Cookie-Metrics at Quantcast
Since June 22nd or so, the usual cookie measurements have been automatically adjusted to account for the frequency that cookies are erased, modified, and so on. This makes significant differences between visitor measurements before and after the new adjustments. Some visitors erase cookies more often than others. This tendency can be predicted by the type of visitor — their profile specifics — and by the type of site being measured — by contents and related site characteristics
You can read about this new technology at the new Quantcast Cookie technical info page. They also have a “Cookie Corrected Audience Data” whitepaper PDF that explains even more.
This is very sophisticated stuff. However, it appears that Quantcast total traffic estimates and specific audience profile estimates have shifted dramatically after this improvement.
Many sites have changed their relative positions by 10, 20 or even 25 percentage points. Some went up and some down of course, in the new ratings.
Becoming a “Quantified” Web-Site
If you’re a web marketeer, we recommend you apply for a Quantcast account, which is free. They will give you a snippet of cookie code to copy and place in your footer that lets them accurately measure your traffic.
The code snippet is not visible to visitors and doesn’t slow down your site.
However, even if you decide NOT to join their metrics system, you should use Quantcast often to keep track of your ‘estimated’ traffic and visitor profiles, no matter how broad and rough they might seem. It will be nice to know what incomes, family size, education, and other info can be estimated about your traffic.
Good luck to you in the highly competitive web marketing world. We think using Quantcast.com several times a week will help you in the struggle to monetize your web.
