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Metrics Throwdown Part 1: Quantcast

This is part one of three part series comparing free metrics data sites.

Reliable data is hard to come by for free when it comes to traffic data. Companies like Nielsen sell detailed metrics data to corporations for tens of thousands of dollars a year. The data, however is incredibly detailed and in-depth, but to be honest, there's only so granular you need to get to be able to still grasp the traffic of a certain site. For instance, I do not need to know that 0.03 percent of the people who come to my site donated to Save the Pandas last year. But I do need to know how many people came to my site (or almost equally as important, a competitor's site) last month.

The three kings of free data are (in no specific order): Quantcast, Compete and Quark Base. For all thee three sites I have chosen Viddler as the control data source. I have purposefully omitted Alexa from this because the third, and newest contender, Quark Base, uses Alexa traffic data.

First in the line up is Quantcast (Viddler.com data here). Upon doing your first search, you'll first notice they have very detailed demographic data... almost surprisingly detailed demographic data. Quantcast boasts detailed, percentage based, gender, age, race, children, income and education level breakdown. It compares them with the Internet average and gives you an index number that shows which people visit the site more than others.

Right next to demographic information is traffic frequency profiles, as well as monthly uniques. One column over more is a really nice automated summary of the site. For Viddler, it generated the following summary:

This site reaches approximately 60,293 U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a slightly more female than male, 50+ audience.The typical visitor visits consolecheatcodes.com and reads Engadget.

While traffic data is really just limited to monthly uniques with time frame comparisons, demographic data is incredibly detailed. To make the data even more digestible, Quantcast provides an easy visualization of the noteworthy top-lines in each demographic category. But take note, these top-lines aren't whatever the greatest number in the category is, it's simply the highest index (relationship to the rest of the internet) number in that category. So for Viddler, it displays in the education breakdown that the top-line is "Graduates and Post-Graduates" with an index of 141, when the highest crowd in the category is "No College" with 40% of all traffic and an index of 100.

Personally, I wish Quantcast just show the greatest number in the category as the top-line, instead of the highest index. For example, let's say 1% of my site visitors are pink bunnies, and the rest aren't. However, the total number of pink bunnies that visit my site on a monthly basis is way above the Internet average with an index of 190. This would be the graphical top-line that Quantcast displays, even though it's a nearly useless statistic.

Onto the scoring:

Traffic Data 7
Demographics Data 9
Social & Blog Data 1
Bonus Features 8
Overall6.25

What's your opinnion on Quantcast?

Subscribe to the Appify RSS to catch parts two and three of this series.


Find part two here.

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