All Hail Quantcast
by Patrick Ruffini :: April 20th, 2007 9:20 pmIn the past few days, I’ve grown addicted to Quantcast.
As a market research tool, it blows the doors off Alexa. It includes demographic data on a site’s visitors, as well as other related sites a visitor is likely to go to and frequency of visits (from addicts to first-time visitors). While you sometimes see odd data and the charts jumping around more than they should, the related sites, demographics, and intensity data are pretty believable for most well trafficked sites. Here’s a sample site page, for Drudge.
The key differentiator between Quantcast (and Compete) vs. Alexa is that the former is panel-based, while the latter depends on your installing an annoying toolbar. Which means that while Alexa is usually accurate and less prone to daily swings, there is selection bias in who installs the toolbar. In my experience it’s likely to be techie types — a link from Digg or Slashdot is more likely to send your Alexa numbers hurtling into the stratosphere. That’s surprising as you’d expect more sophisticated users to be wary of spyware and browser bloat.
Quantcast approximates my vision for a social analytics tool that not only allows you to publicly rank yourself on the traffic spectrum but gives you information on demographics and what other sites your readers are viewing. Its “Quantification” tool, which I’ve installed on PatrickRuffini.com, gives you an accurate read on your unique monthly readers (which you can get from Google Analytics) but the real benefit is more accurate data on related sites and search terms.
One random thing I LOVE about the tool: We can finally track subdomain traffic. Alexa is virtually useless for tracking subdomains, which is particularly useful on massive sites like Blogspot.com where a subdomain equals a site. For those sites that use subdomains, it enables you to drill down on particular segments of that audience (for instance, people who went to a Contribute page for a political candidate).
Two random things I don’t love. You can’t embed their charts, yet. Also, like Compete.com, which offers a monthly, less granular read on unique visitors (a data point that’s completely opaque in Alexa), Quantcast vastly underestimates unique visitors by as much as 200 to 300%. I suspect this is because they’re not differentiating between U.S. and non-U.S. visits; you have to Quantify your site to get that breakdown plus an accurate number for daily and monthly uniques.
While we will always rely on Nielsen, comScore, and Hitwise data for the big guys, I am starting to think that tools like Quantcast are downright better overall because of their coverage of niche sites and the long tail. The problem with Nielsen is that their panels are small and traffic numbers can spike greatly from week to week even with no change in actual traffic. If you don’t have a monthly unique number well north of one million, the demographics and week-to-week data can be extremely jumpy. Over time, the numbers even out, but for 99.9% of sites, Nielsen is of little use. In a long tail universe, that’s unacceptable.
Soon, all basic traffic data on the Internet will be free and transparent. The premium will be in the analysis and SPSSable data sets (if I could see Siteographics for ALL sites, not just the top 4 in 3 categories, I would pay good money for that).
And with the recent release of Google’s Web History, I suspect Palo Alto may be getting into the game soon too.
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Tagged: alexa 
analytics metrics quantcast traffic
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