How to Find Website Demographics

As an advertiser, you should know if the U.S. market for your product or service visits a particular website before you spend money to advertise there. You wouldn't put your magazine ad dollars into Vogue if you wanted to reach NASCAR-loving middle-aged men, would you? You should be equally careful with your internet ad dollars. While several site analytics companies provide statistics on traffic, one--Quantcast Corporation--offers detailed audience profiles for more than 20 million sites and growing.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Go to Quantcast's website. (See Resources.) Enter the web address of the website you want to know more about in the search box on the home page or on the "Find an Audience" page.

2. Check your prospect site's traffic level. Quantcast gives each site a ranking like an AlexaRank or Compete Snapshot, and provides monthly counts of U.S. uniques and total visits. You'll also find audience composition charts, based on the relative proportions of a site's audience that are made up of passers-by, regulars and addicts (more than 30 visits in a month).

3. Review the summary and click on the demographics tab of the profile to find out the demographic make-up of your prospect site's audience. Pie charts represent visitor gender, age, income, ethnicity, number of children and educational attainment.

4. Compare the attributes of your prospect site's audience with the attributes of the overall U.S. internet population by reviewing the indexed bar charts. If a site indexes 100 in an attribute, its visitors are as likely to have that trait as U.S. internet users overall. An index of 200 means this site's visitors are twice as likely to have the attribute as the overall population; an index of 50 means half as likely.

5. Make a lifestyle and brand-preference assessment of a website's audience by reviewing the right hand column of the summary tab. "Brand and Site Affinities" lists other sites visited by a website's audience. Quantcast's affinity scores measure the strength of an audience's affinity for specific other sites relative to the whole U.S. internet population. A "Similar Audience" list displays the other internet destinations that visitors to the site have a strong affinity for.

6. Identify high-traffic sites whose audience possesses the demographic attributes of your company's market. These are likely to be good candidates for your advertising efforts and budget.

Tips & Warnings

• This is a free media measurement service and the site is open to the public.
• As a website publisher, you can use Quantcast to determine the composition of your own audience. This can help you target your content and attract advertisers. To increase the accuracy of your data, create a free "Quantified Publisher" account and copy a personalized Quantcast tag into your website pages to help gather direct data.

Resources

• Quantcast website

[corriher]

on 7/6/2009 This reads like spam from quantcast. By some strange "coincidence" both Alexia and Quantcast are giving our site exactly the same low numbers. Actually, I don't think it is a coincidence. I think quantcast must be secretly a division of Alexia (at least a partner), and we are artificially being ranked low by these corporate whores for being an alternative health site (NaturallyGoodMagazine.com). We actually embedded java script to help quantcast track exactly our number of visitors, and quantcast is reporting like 16 visitors a day -- somehow that entire other 8,000 visitors must not be using java script, right? If they are doing it to us, then they are doing it to others, and that means there is no credibility whatsoever to these two (or one) company(s). This is the sort of corruption that has ruined the Wiki's like
Wikipedia and Wikianswers.