See How Your Site Stacks Up with Quantcast

By Joel Burslem on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 Filed Under: Internet

So just who is visiting online real estate sites?

Finding good publicly available (free) metrics to measure the popularity of a web site is a challenging proposition. Technorati rankings rate the number of inbound links, but measure only the activity in publicly accessible (i.e. spiderable) blogs. Alexa uses data from its toolbar to determine a site’s traffic, but is skewed by the number, and type, of people that have installed the toolbar.

There are commercial services like comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings or Hitwise, but these are generally expensive and of not much use to the little guy.

Quantcast is a new site that aims to try and tackle this problem. They are calling themselves the Open Internet Ratings Service, from their site:

Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of a half million web sites here. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.

Quantcast creates a traffic overview and ranking for each site but drills down into some pretty interesting demographic data to see exactly who is visiting a site and how frequently they return.

Profile for trulia.com

Seems like Trulia has a bit of a ’stickiness’ problem. People are passing by but not returning.

Quantcast - Profile for zillow.com

I wonder if this data will play into the NCRC’s complaint?

Quantcast - Profile for redfin.com

Wow, Redfin visitors make a lot of dough.

Blog owners or website publishers who want to get their site included in the results can submit their site through Quantcast’s Quantified Publisher Program. I did this recently with this site, and Quantcast is still compiling information on my visitors so it doesn’t have the same kind of rich data yet. You can see what they’ve got so far here.

Share this post:

Sphere: Related Content

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Conversation - Add Your Thoughts Here

4 Comment(s)

john harper | Nov 15, 2006 | Reply

I checked out Quantcast. Besides selling real estate (https://sanramon.wordpress.com/), I am the webmaster of http://www.ahalmaas.com

I have been using Google Analytics since April of this year to track traffic to the almaas site and I can say with certainty that the information provided by Quantcast is worse than a Zestimate. Their analysis is so far off base I can’t imagine where they are getting the data.

I see on Quantcast that they have a link for me to provide them with more info and also I can put some of their code on the site so they can track it. Perhaps this is their underlying motive.
REBlogGirl | Nov 16, 2006 | Reply

I love the tool. Joel, you are always a super sleuth when it comes to new tools and whatnot. While I agree that the data is not accurate, I think it is a indicator of your overall site popularity. It has value in that you can see how other sites in your niche measure up against your own and gives you an idea if you may or may not be headed in the right direction. Thanks for the tip.
Krista | Aug 15, 2007 | Reply

Hi Joel — Krista from Quantcast here.

Thanks for your vote of confidence. As you note, our model is unique in that we invite publishers to participate in the ratings process by tagging their sites for direct measurement.

For those publishers who have not yet joined our free program, we show panel-based estimates based on a large panel of more than 1.5 million internet users.

But even large panels have shortcomings — particularly for smaller sites or targeted sites with a narrowly focused userbase.

That is precisely why we created a new model. Unlike radio and television for which panels were developed, everything on the web *can* be measured. We offer a free way to do exactly that.

Folks who want to improve the accuracy of their profiles can go to Quantcast.com and click on Learn More. Thanks.
Cal | Mar 4, 2008 | Reply

Decided to give Quantcast’s Quantified program a shot. A few weeks into it and I am extremely disappointed at how inaccurate the data is. Aside from gross undercounting, the demographics is about as far out of left field as one can imagine. We know our audience and market very well, but Quantcast’s demographics show an asbsurdly different one. Avoid Quantcast like the plague, their service sucks.