Traffic Analysis Part 1 – Qauntcast

Occasionally, I enjoy taking an in-depth look at the traffic statistics of the site. To do this, I use a combination of traffic analysis sites, which include Quantcast, Google Analytics, Compete and Alexa. I wanted to take a few posts and analyze the current traffic, while explaining each component I address. I wanted to start with perhaps the most intriguing of them all, Quantcast. To me, the most valuable aspect of Quantcast is the ability to take a deeper look into your visitors.

About Quantcast

You don’t need to download a toolbar to use Quantcast. You insert a small HTML chunk of code into your site and they do all the work. The code enables Quantcast to track the traffic to provide thorough details such as your traffic’s average income, age group, gender, cookies and much more. For the graphs below, the “index” is a comparison to the internet average, which is 100.

Quantcast Ranking

The algorithm that Quantcast uses it not made public, but based on the traffic rankings, Eazy Cheezy is currently sitting at 45,641. Quantcast measures by US Audience and for many sites specifies the typical audience it appeals to.

Quantcast Daily Traffic

This component uses a graph to determine how many people have visited your site. Quantcast measures cookies, impressions, page views and more in your choice of daily, weekly or monthly views. Let’s take a look at Eazy Cheezy’s Monthly Traffic. As you can see, since Quantcast started tracking, my best month was October 2009 and I average 28.8K US and 42.9K Global visitors per month. October 6th was a very nice day as I pulled in 65.4K Global visitors that month.

Visitors by Country

Quantcast provides specific geographic information about visitors and break the information down by city, state, country and designated marking area. The detailed information includes cookies, unique %, uniques index, visits % and visits index. Below, you’ll find the top visitors to Eazy Cheezy by country. I knew the US was my top country by uniques, but had no clue the UK, Canada, Germany and Australia rounded out my top 5. On a related note, my top 5 US States are led by California, followed by New York, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Demographics

Perhaps the most helpful information provides is in the demographics. As you can see, we can find out some very helpful information about either our site or any other. Eazy Cheezy tends to appeal to males, from 18 to 49 years old. Other helpful information includes ethnicity, whether individuals have kids or not and education.

Businesses

One final component I wanted to cover is businesses. This information tells you whether your audience tends to visit from home or their work. For those who access your site from their work, you can see the size of their company. As you can see below, I have 9 notable large businesses that access Eazy Cheezy. The most interesting to me is Research in Motion (RIM), the driving force behind BlackBerry.

This was just a short glimpse of what Quantcast can do. You can break information down in several different ways and in a variety of different components. This information is very helpful to potential advertisers or those looking to publish content to a specific audience.