Quantcast Internet Ratings – A publisher & advertiser’s dream
MarketingVOX ran a blurb today on a new company called Quantcast. Quantcast is described as follows:
Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of a half million web sites here. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
This service is what Google Analytics (light-weight, free web analytics) is to Omniture SiteCatalyst (heavy-duty web analytics). It functions on a similar methodology of partnering with ISPs for aggregate data and crossing it with panel data to provide a higher-level overview of your target audience such as:
- Gender
- Age
- Household income
- Ethnicity
- Head of household education
- Children
This is similar to the data that Hitwise provides, but the very tip of the iceberg and best of all, free. Where it’s extremely valuable is you can analyze the stats of other sites (partners, competitors, potential sponsors, etc.). Hitwise, through their contractual structure, will typically limit your reach within the data to just the pre-defined categories that sites are lumped into. Hitwise also provides a much deeper dive into the data. Quantcast is a superb service for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Sitegraphics & Common Audience (I love these!)
What is also provides is a snapshot of the sites that index well against your audience (the “Sitegraphics” feature). Additionally, it also provides a list of sites that your audience also visits. Check out the snapshot of SuperMotors.net here. Unfortunately, we changed domain names in July of ‘06, so there’s only 5 months of data (their stats go through November 2006 thus far), so the data isn’t 100% accurate. I have however added their tracking code to SuperMotors.net in an effort to paint a more accurate picture of our visitors.
What value does this provide?
As a site owner, this is a very powerful tool, particularly if you sell your own advertising inventory. On SuperMotors, while we run Tribal Fusion and Google AdSense ads, we also have our own ad serving system and subsequently sell inventory in it. We do not have a dedicated sales force, so we rely heavily on ad networks for revenue. That said, selling our own inventory offers the greatest ROI.
In looking at the “Common Audience” chart:
We have data that supports which sites our visitors also frequent — thus we have data to bring to potential sponsors to help sell ad inventory
Here we see where our visitors are also going. I know of a lot of these sites and personally visit them quite often. You can see a trend of Ford and Bronco-related sites, primarily because our userbase indexes heavily towards those makes and models of automobiles. Those sites aside, we also see retailer sites such as Summit Racing, 4 Wheel Parts, Edelbrock, Bronco Graveyard, James Duff, and BC Broncos. Fortunately for us, Bronco Graveyard is already a sponsor on SuperMotors.net (where we sold directly out of our inventory). We now have data that can help us craft a story to approach these other retailers and manufacturers. This shows that our visitors also visit their sites. This has nothing to do with referring links, it simply tells us over time that these sites are also visited by our members.
But, if they’re already visiting these retail/manufacturer sites, why would they want to advertise on SuperMotors.net? They already are getting the traffic.
Sure, this argument could be made. However, one of the driver’s behind choosing where to advertise is qualifying the sites you advertise on. What better way than to advertise on sites that you know is already a match for some of your consumers. Leverage this demographical data and expand your reach to this network that is already proving it has qualified consumers.
As a sponsor or someone who spends ad dollars, this tool is great to identify sites on which you would consider advertising on.
On the flip-side of this coin, this also means we could pursue partnership opportunities with the non-retail sites who have visitors that use our services. Perhaps even we would advertise on these sites to further promote our services. We are much better off advertising where we already have advocates than trying from ground zero. The same holds true for retailers who are looking to advertise online. Examine the sites where your users are currently visiting and tap into the visitor bases of those sites.
Moral of the story: Use data to support your advertising pitches
Ad networks frequently approach advertisers and pitch them on demographics, ages, incomes, education, and all of the metrics that align with an advertiser’s target market. If you sell your own advertising on your site like we do, use this tool to identify potential sponsors and leverage the data in your sales pitch. It’s a much more compelling if visitor data shows that users who visit Yoursite.com also visit TheSponsorYouWant.com. It’s hard for a potential sponsor to tell you, “no” because it’s hard to argue against data. This levels the playing field for you if you’re a smaller company — get them hooked with the data and talk about the sponsorship package you can put together for them.
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