Quantcast.com is a great tool for website analytics and marketing. They are very popular and are used by thousands of companies, including many major websites which regularly get millions of visitors. Quantcast.com has many different features available, and if you run a website or are a part of a team which maintains a website, you may find Quantcast software useful. Let’s take a closer look at the various features of the Quantcast.com software, and their pros and cons.
Features
A quick visit to the Quantcast home page gives you a lot of options, many of which you may have never heard of, even if you work in marketing. Here are some of the features:
• Web analytics. As a user, you can see demographic data for any site. Sites that use Quantcast have exact numbers, and sites that don’t still show estimated traffic data. You can sign up for a free account and use them to track your website’s traffic, too.
• Lookalikes. The Quantcast home page prominently advertises their ability to buy and sell lookalikes. This means that instead of just regular traffic, they know lots of detailed demographic data, and can advertise to very specific audiences. As a Quantcast user, you can buy or sell very specific, targeted web traffic.
• Advertisements. Quantcast can help you track, find, and sell ads on your site.
The Good
Quantcast’s extensive data is pretty cool to just an ordinary user, and extraordinarily awesome to a marketer of website owner. It is also the thing that sets them apart from other similar analytics services – they know a lot about web traffic, and can target <i>very</i> specific markets. Another of their huge advantages comes from being an independent third party. Advertisers know and trust them to be accurate, so they don’t have to worry about whether or not publishers are actually showing their ads enough times or if they are really getting the traffic that they claim they are.
The Bad
For all its good features, Quantcast is not without its downsides. For one thing, their data sources are a bit ambiguous. Sure, it’s easy to track what pages a user visits, where they are from (using their IP address), and what they click on, but exactly Quantcast gets their data on age and gender is a little bit ambiguous. Along those same lines, it is easy to believe that Quantcast can very accurately track websites which have signed up and use the Quantcast tracking code, but their data for sites that are not “<i>Quant</i>ified†is just an estimate, and as such can be a bit off, especially for smaller sites.
Review and Rating
Overall, Quantcast is a great and reliable service that is definitely worth using. There data sources are a little bit sketchy for some sites, however they are completely reliable if you put their tracking code on your site, so they can be a great way to prove to your advertisers that you really get the traffic you claim. Their ability to move highly targeted traffic is unparalleled, and is a great way to find the traffic you need.