Getting To Know You: What Quantcast Can Tell You About Your Site's Traffic

For anyone who has a website, traffic is king. Whether you're an internet marketer, publisher or just simply a blogger, you probably consider traffic as a high value commodity in the internet. In fact, you're probably paying for it, just to make sure it flows in your direction. If learning about your site's traffic is on top of your priority list, you don’t have to pay for it anymore, especially now when Quantcast Internet Ratings is off and running.

What is Quantcast?
Quantcast is a company that offers open internet ratings services, the first of its kind. It is similar to Alexa, but has slightly different features, some of which you might find interesting and useful. Because it's an open service, it's free of cost so anyone can use it. With their Quantified Publisher Program, Quantcast can accurately give you the real figure that corresponds to the traffic activity of your site. It will also publish estimates, although they are still fine tuning this feature at the moment. This service is free, so you can kiss your third party traffic research company goodbye and save money.

Quantcast's goal is to help website owners or publishers to determine the size of their audience, monitor traffic activity and provide potential advertisers more accurate information about the number of traffic they receive. Advertisers are much more likely to get to know what kind of audience you have based on factual figures and not on estimates or online gossip. Quantcast is composed of experts in the web analytics field.

What Quantcast can tell you about your site's traffic
Unlike Alexa, Quantcast does not provide an indicator of your site's traffic through a simple toolbar. Quantcast actually lets you in on the who and what of your traffic. The service actually analyzes your traffic by using the actual data your site generates, based on certain check points. You can expect to learn about your traffic's demographics, as provided by advertisers, ad networks, ISPS and of course, publishers. It then comes up with an analysis of traffic rankings of millions of websites (20 million and counting).

Advertisers can then evaluate a site better using its demographics and traffic information. Quantcast can also provide information such as an estimate of unique visitors per month and a comparative traffic chart that provides an overview of the site's activities.

Another key feature that is unique to Quantcast is that it can also provide you a very useful breakdown of information about your site's visitors – their age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, etc. You can then check if you're attracting mainly males or females, youngish or older crowds, Caucasians or Asians, college educated or high school crowds. Quantcast can even inform you what websites, magazines, stores or television shows your audience is interested in.

Do you need Quantcast?
First of all, it's free, a refreshing change from all that costly traffic monitoring services we used to subscribe to in the past. Second, if you're the type of website owner who needs information about your traffic whether it's for business or just curiosity, Quantcast can help. You'll get a comprehensive report about your traffic. You don’t only know how many people there are who visit your site, you also get to know who they are based on certain demographics. If you need to know your audience to help you improve your site, tweak your features, provide relevant advertisements, create a stronger SEO plan or just simply want to satisfy your curiosity, Quantcast is a definite must-try.

Using Quantcast
Simply log on to Quantcast.com and click on 'My Sites'. Type your domain name and provide your site's javascript tag. If you have more than one site, simply include their tags as well. Once that's done, Quantcast will immediately begin monitoring and measuring your site's traffic. If you need some statistics, simply go back to the site and refer to the figures that will appear in your profile page.

So should Alexa's knees start knocking against each other? Quantcast is a relatively new service and as such, still needs a little improvement. In fact, some of its features are still limited. However, it provides some very useful services that are not available with Alexa and some other similar services. With Quantcast around, website owners have more reasons to shed the veil of anonymity surrounding their audience and hopefully, provide better content and services which in the end, will benefit us all.