Website publishers looking for free, web-based tools that provide user behavior and pageview data have a few places they can go. Unfortunately, all of them are at least partially inaccurate or flawed in some way. Alexa is a friend to many in this particular office, but we know we have to take the data it spits out with a grain of salt.
Now there's a new player called Quantcast, a site that claims to offer "the world's first open internet ratings service." The in-depth user data that Quantcast generates is desirable to both publishers and advertisers – content sites can see who's using their service and advertisers can see where their target audiences are hanging out.
Here's a sample report.
Quantcast gives you pageview data and a visitor frequency profile as
well as information on the gender, age, income, ethnicity and education
of a site's users. Quantcast culls its data from traditional panels as
well as a proprietary mathematical model called Mass Inference.
Site publishers can sign up for the site's free Quantified Publishers
program in order to help make their data tracking more accurate.
Steve Rubel, whose blog Micro Persuasion was where I first learned
about Quantcast, has some excellent thoughts about what this type of
extended reporting will mean for bloggers and the "little guys" looking
to monetize their traffic.
[via Micro Persuasion]
