Kingish.com It's a way of life

I was recently reminded about Quantcast by a friend over at ModernWebmaster.net in his post on Tracking your Competitor Sites.

Their Web Site Audience Profiles are an excellent way of getting a glimpse of who your visitors are. Sadly, they only measure traffic from the US, which limits its value for global sites like UsingEnglish.com. You can see the demographic statistics for the American visitors to UsingEnglish.com at the Web Site Audience Profile for UsingEnglish.com. I'll quote from their FAQ: "Quantcast's audience ratings are based on the analysis of massive amounts of internet usage data. How massive? Billions of web site visits every month. By analyzing this data we are able to interpret patterns of internet usage and provide the reports that you see here."

Quantcast's 'Audience Profile' shows standard demographics like gender and age, but it also gives you a sampling of other information such as what clothing & TV sites they visit and sites with a similar audience. Most interestingly, they also have 'Audience Keywords', which they describe as "keywords a site's audience tends to type in. These are often but not always the keywords that brought people to the site". From an internet marketing perspective this information is very interesting, and from an advertising point-of-view it's gold dust. For the US that is. Don't get me wrong, I love Quantcast's statistics, but they are very biased.

The statistics it provides for UsingEnglish.com are widely off the mark. It currently states that UsingEnglish.com has a monthly US audience of 54,978, but Google Analytics tells me that the site had 148,482 visits from across the pond in the last month to-date. Other statistics are harder to compare. If their statistics are reflective of about 1/3 of the US traffic then that's quite a decent sample to make judgement calls about your site. If the sampling of the US population is indicative of anything, it tells us something about part of the site's audience.

Of course, a site like UsingEnglish.com which teaches the English language, has a far broader appeal than the US. In fact, the UK & US are not the target audience in the slightest. Hopefully services like this will stop being so US-western-centric and involve the rest of the world to a greater degree. If this concerns me, then it's probably been considered by most other sites that target a global or international audience.

Having said all of that, if you target the US this is great material to work with. Even if you don't it can be eye-opening to look at your site visitors in this way.