Get In-Depth Demographic Information About Your Readers with Quantcast

When I began blogging about a year ago, I thought Google Analytics was all I needed to successfully track the statistics of my blog readers. I soon found Google Analytics is very valuable, but a bit limited in finding more information about your readers. This is where Quantcast comes into play. Quantcast is a free site that provides a ranking for each site and tracks general information such as page-views, visits, page-views per person and cookies. However, the value is in how Quantcast analyzes your specific audience. It tracks information such as age, children per household, education and income levels, male vs. female, business visits vs. home visits, businesses who access your site, etc.

I probably only visit Quantcast every few weeks, but learn something new about my visitors each time I visit. In fact, I just found something quite interesting! I’ve had 2,779 visits from Research in Motion (RIM), from 124 unique users. This is very cool! RIM is the developer of the BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry App World and is a very large and successful company. Since covering BlackBerry Apps is one of my priorities, this is a very intriguing.

Quantcast gives you the ability to embed various charts or even download all statistics into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. I’ll cover a few of the charts below, which I have used printscreens to capture for your reference.

This chart provides information on your choice of daily, weekly or monthly visits and you can select the range and get an overall view or make it specific by segment, by gender, age, ethnicity, household income or by using a combination.

The chart below is perhaps the most informative! I get US demographics for my visitor’s gender, age, ethnicity, kids, income and educational levels. This chart is quite valuable if you’re looking to target to a specific audience and advertising.

The next chart shows you where visitors are accessing your site from, their business or home.

Most of this information for all the websites can be seen from the public view, but you can get even more in-depth information from your publisher view once you’re logged in. Quantcast also measures the top 1 million sites. Here is a printscreen of the top 25, along with information regarding the type of audience each site attracts. For example, Facebook is number 3 on the list and has “94M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more affluent, teen and young adult, very slightly female biased following.”

As you can see, Quantcast can be very useful to publishers and advertisers. If you are interested in getting your site quantified, you can start by visiting Quantcast and creating a free login. You can then generate a tag, copy and paste it onto your site, then have your site scanned.