Quantcast Measure – FAQ for Publishers
About the Quantcast Measure
- How much does Quantcast Measure cost?
- Who should use Quantcast Measure?
- What information from my profile can I download from Quantcast?
- How do I remove my site from Quantcast’s listing?
Setting Up Quantcast for Your Web Properties and Networks
- Can I host quant.js on my own server?
- I’m trying to Quantify multiple sites. Can I use the same tag?
- I have multiple websites, can one Quantcast account track all of them?
- Some of my internal domains are appearing on my profile. How can I hide them?
- How can I exclude my internal traffic from my traffic counts?
- My site gets changed often, by many different people. Any advice for keeping my tag from falling off?
- Can I remove/modify any portion of the Quantcast tag?
- Can I have multiple Quantcast tags on a site?
- Will the Quantcast tag interfere with other third party tracking codes, such as Omniture or Google Analytics?
- How do I add Quantcast to my WordPress-hosted website or blog?
- How do I add Quantcast to my Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress Platform website?
Quantcast Methodology and Reports
- How do you obtain your demographic information?
- Is there a Quantcast stat equivalent to the metric ‘Unique Visitors’ or ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’ that my javascript-based web analytics package uses?
- What does the Quantcast ‘People’ number in publisher profiles mean?
- What is the date range for the traffic numbers on your site?
- Quantcast provides audience data for sites that do not participate in Quantcast Measure and notes that such sites “Are Not Quantified” and the “Data is Estimated.” What does this mean?
- Can Quantcast measure Ajax activity?
Quantcast Data and Terminology
- I added your tag to my site but my profile looks the same. Why?
- I’ve inserted my tags into my widget/advertisement/video/other distributed media, but why don’t I see the data anywhere?
- In my Network view, I see three different traffic classifications: Website, Syndicated, and Network. What’s the difference?
- I see many sections of profiles are rated with an ‘Index’, such as Demographic and Geographic data. What is an Index?
- Profiles often contain ‘Affinity’ data to categories and other sites. What do the numbers represent?
- As a Quantified Publisher, what control do I have over my data’s visibility to the public?
- How does Quantcast treat subdomains?
- I requested access to hidden data, when and how can I view the hidden data?
- I requested a site get Quantified via the “Request site Quantify” link. When will the site data be directly measured?
- Why is my Quantcast Quantified data different from what panel-centric syndicated services report?
Troubleshooting
- Why don’t the numbers for my site align with my internal statistics?
- I’m a Quantified Publisher, why isn’t my data matching up with my internal analytics?
- Why isn’t my profile displaying demographic/geographic/lifestyle/business data?
How much does it cost for publishers to use Quantcast Measure?
Quantcast Measure is a completely free service. Joining our program will allow you to gather traffic information, as well as granular demographic, geographic, lifestyle and business data for all of your web properties, all while granting you complete control over what data you choose to make public.
Who should use Quantcast Measure?
Website owners and publishers, widget makers, Facebook application developers, advertising networks, video providers, and just about anyone else who owns or operates a web property of some kind. With our Javascript, HTML and Flash based measurement methods, we’re able to provide granular traffic and demographic information on nearly any type of web content.
What information from my profile can I download from Quantcast?
You can download audience data for your web properties in CSV format. This includes all report information you see when you sign into Quantcast, including traffic, traffic frequency, demographics, geo, business and affinities. Grab your data, open it up in Excel and use it as you wish. To start, sign into Quantcast and click the Download button to chose the data you want.
Note that you can only download information for your web properties and you must be signed in to Quantcast to access it.
How do I remove my site from Quantcast’s listing?
We do not remove sites from our listing. We recommend joining our free Quantcast Measure program for publishers in order to get more accurate traffic statistics as well as gain control over which data points you make visible to the public, and which you use for internal purposes only.
Can I host quant.js on my own server?
No, quant.js is dynamically generated each time it’s served and needs to be served from our specially configured servers. Hosting quant.js will mean that we are unable to generate audience data for your site.
I’m trying to Quantify multiple sites. Can I use the same tag?
Yes, the tag is specific to you, not to a site. You can use the same tag on all sites you own, just be sure add each site (when you sign in, click Get Quantified). If you have over 10 sites you want to add, please contact us.
I have multiple websites, can one Quantcast account track all of them?
Absolutely, we encourage you to use the same Quantcast tag for multiple properties, including websites and distributed media such as ads. This will allow you to look at the de-duplicated reach and demographics for all of your online assets.
For multiple web sites, simply add your Quantcast tag to all of the pages of a particular site. Networks can be composed of an unlimited number of sites.
For distributed media such as widgets, ads, or videos, their traffic will automatically be attributed to ‘Syndicated Traffic’ in your network view.
Some of my internal domains are appearing on my profile. How can I hide them?
If your staging environment is a subdomain of a site you’ve quantified, such as staging.quantcast.com, you may see us reporting traffic counts to it and rolling those up into your total. The best way to avoid that is to keep our measurement pixel from reporting the traffic, either by including it selectively when you generate the pages or by configuring your firewall to block requests to quantserve.com referred from that domain.
How can I exclude my internal traffic from my traffic counts?
Internal traffic, meaning visits from you or other employees of your company to your own site, is a tiny part of a typical site’s audience. Studies we’ve done have estimated it at less than 1%. If you’re generating an unusual amount of internal traffic, you should omit it from your traffic counts. You can either add server logic to your pages to exclude our measurement tag on requests from your own IP addresses or configure your firewall to block requests to quantserve.com referred from your site.
Note that our traffic counts automatically exclude robots and spiders when they identify themselves in the User-Agent request header. Traffic generated by Googlebot, monitoring services such as Gomez, and other mainstream bots known to the IAB’s Bot and Spider List will already be excluded from your counts. If you’re using an automated, homegrown means of generating traffic to your site, you should make sure it identifies itself by putting “robot” in the User-Agent.
My site gets changed often, by many different people. Any advice for keeping my tag from falling off?
For larger publishers, ensuring that Quantcast, Omniture, and other tags stay in place and are configured properly can be a difficult problem both technically and organizationally. We recommend doing a realistic assessment of the magnitude of the problem for your organization and considering third-party products such as Maxamine or ObservePoint.
Can I remove/modify any portion of the Quantcast tag?
To ensure proper functionality, we prevent publishers from modifying the code in any way by not allowing the site to be scanned in if it doesn’t match the expected tag layout. If you would like to do a custom implementation, please contact us.
Can I have multiple Quantcast tags on a site?
Yes, two or more Quantcast tags can be on a page without interfering with one another. However, a site can only be ‘Quantified’ to one account and network at a time. That said, the traffic will be attributed to all tags equally, but labeled differently in our user interface. For the account that the site is officially ‘Quantified’ with, we will label all traffic as ‘Website’ traffic, and for all other Quantcast tags on the site, traffic will be labeled as ‘Syndicated’ traffic.
‘Syndicated’ and ‘Website’ traffic are weighted equally in our system (Website + Syndicated Traffic = Network Traffic), but are labeled differently for the sake of transparency.
Will the Quantcast tag interfere with other third party tracking codes, such as Omniture or Google Analytics?
No, many of our publishers also run a web analytics package in addition to Quantcast.
How do I add Quantcast to my WordPress-hosted website or blog?
Fortunately, most sites hosted by WordPress.com are automatically Quantified. You can see your data by going to http://www.quantcast.com and typing in the full URL of your blog in the search box. We periodically scan in new WordPress blogs, so they show up as ‘Quantified,’ however if you’re experiencing delays please contact us with the URL of your site for assistance
How do I add Quantcast to my Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress Platform website?
If you’re using Joomla, Drupal, or the WordPress Platform (as opposed to WordPress Hosted) as a Content Management System then you must have access to the files being hosted by your web-hosting provider.
The easiest way to become Quantified is to place your Quantcast tag in a common file that is loaded on every page, such as a footer. For most implementations of the three CMS listed above, common files are usually in the ‘Themes’ folder and are labeled something like ‘footer.php’, ‘index.php’ and so forth. Simply open the file on your computer, add your Quantcast code at the bottom of the file, and re-save the file to your web-host.
At that point, you can login to your Quantcast account add your site to Quantcast and start the Quantification process.
How do you obtain your demographic information?
The calculation of audience composition is the most ground-breaking aspect of Quantcast’s audience service. Quantcast’s visit graph inference model enables the characterization of digital media audiences of nearly any size. Quantcast’s composition inference approach is built on the foundation of direct measurement and provides rich audience profiles for millions of digital media assets, with as few as 500 unique viewers. Quantcast has NOT built its model on PII (personal identifiable data) data, but instead uses numerous data inputs that provide some insight into demographic benchmarks and a large scale mathematical model to infer demographics of visitors.
Is there a Quantcast stat equivalent to the metric ‘Unique Visitors’ or ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’ that my javascript-based web analytics package uses?
Yes, you should compare Unique Visitors/Absolute Unique Visitors with the ‘Cookies’ statistic that we provide for Quantified Publishers.
Javascript-based analytics packages such as Google Analytics and Omniture come to the ‘Unique Visitor’ number for a website by counting how many unique ‘Cookies’ (a small text file that your browser uses to identify you to individual sites) they see over a certain period of time.
What does the Quantcast ‘People’ number in publisher profiles mean?
One of the several issues with using the pure ‘cookie-counting’ methodology is that it does not account for the same person visiting the same site from multiple computers. The same person is visiting the site, but they are being counted as if they were two.
Quantcast takes cookie counting one step further by correcting for people who delete their cookies, as well as people accessing the same website with multiple computers. The result is our “People” number, which aims to describe the actual number of human beings viewing a web property. You can read more on Quantcast’s methodology here.
What is the date range for the traffic numbers on your site?
For Quantified Publishers, traffic numbers are updated daily and work on a rolling 30-day basis. In other words, when you look at Quantified Publishers, the traffic statistics shown are from the previous 30 days.
For those publishers not participating in our free Quantcast Measure service, our data is updated monthly and posted to the site a few days following the first of the month.
Quantcast provides audience data for sites that do not participate in Quantcast Measure for publishers and notes that such sites “Are Not Quantified” and the “Data is Estimated.” What does this mean?
The benefit of Quantcast Measure for publishers is that it enables any publisher to have directly measured traffic and audience data collected for their property by a trusted third party. For properties that do not participate, we publish “estimated” US audience data, which we derive from a variety of sample data collected from ISPs and Toolbar providers. Because these estimates are not based on actual census level traffic, they are subject to many of the same sample size and population biases that traditional panel-based audience measurement services encounter.
Can Quantcast measure Ajax activity?
Our tag ultimately measures the number of times the browser loads it, whether the load was triggered by a user or by an Ajax call. We show this count as “impressions” or “events” in our reports.
For sites that make heavy use of Ajax, some care should be taken in interpreting this number. It can understate user engagement if the site updates much fine-grained content through Ajax without reloading our tag. Or it can overstate engagement if the site reloads our tag when the user’s back is turned.
I added your tag to my site but my profile looks the same. Why?
For your site profile to show as Quantified, you have to place the tag on every page of your site. After we’ve collected approximately 5 days worth of data, your site will be officially ‘Quantified’.
I’ve inserted my tags into my widget/advertisement/video/other distributed media, but why don’t I see the data anywhere?
Ensure that you have created a Network view. Log into your Quantcast account, and visit the Home|http://www.quantcast.com/user/sites] area of your Quantcast Account. From there, click ‘Create Network’ which will prompt you to enter a name for your network. This will instantly create a network view that will include the reach of all of your distributed media.
In my Network view, I see three different traffic classifications: Website, Syndicated and Network. What’s the difference?
A Network can be made up of both fully Quantified sites and distributed media, and we classify these differently for ease of analysis for publishers. ‘Websites’ traffic is the traffic we see from sites that are scanned in and Quantified under your Quantcast account. ‘Syndicated’ Traffic is traffic we see coming from your tag, but not sitting on a site that you have Quantified (for instance, if you distribute your widget to other web sites, but don’t actually own those web sites). ‘Network traffic is the sum of both ‘Syndicated’ and ‘Web Site’ traffic, indicating the full reach of all of your Quantcast-tagged assets.
I see many sections of profiles are rated with an ‘Index’, such as Demographic and Geographic data. What is an Index?
An index is a measure of how a given metric compares to an average, such as the average US internet user. If a site indexes 100 in college graduates, that means a given visitor to it is as likely to be a college graduate as any US internet user chosen at random. An index of 200 means the visitor is twice as likely to be a college graduate, 50 means half as likely, and so on. The higher the index, the better the site is at attracting that type of audience. Note that a high index does not necessarily mean a high percentage in an absolute sense. For example, approximately 5% of internet users in the US are Asian. A site with an Asian index of 400 would have an audience four times richer than average in Asians, but Asians would still only constitute one visitor in five.
Profiles often contain ‘Affinity’ data to categories and other sites. What do the numbers represent?
Affinity is simply how likely a visitor from one site is to visit another compared to the Internet average. For instance, if Site A has a 14.0x affinity to site B, a visitor from Site A is 14x as likely, when compared to an average Internet user, to visit site B.
As a Quantified Publisher, what control do I have over my data’s visibility to the public?
Quantcast Measure gives publishers control over what data they make public, and which they choose to keep private, including the ability to grant access to people with a Quantcast account
Publishers can configure data visibility in the Home section of your account.
Access control is on a site-by-site basis, and is also set in the ‘Home’ tab of your account by going to ‘Sites’ – ‘Settings’ – ‘User Privileges’. Note that the person you are granting access to must have a registered Quantcast account, available for free at http://www.quantcast.com/user/signup
How does Quantcast treat subdomains?
Quantcast will provide separate profiles on each of a web property’s subdomains as long as your Quantcast tag is present. There is no need to add in each subdomain separately from the domain, as Quantcast will automatically generate them under the ‘Subdomains’ section of your profile.
I requested access to hidden data, when and how can I view the hidden data?
After you’ve submitted your request, the publisher will receive a notification that you’d like access to this data. The notification will include the name and email address associated with the your Quantcast account. At that time, the publisher can choose to accept or deny your request for data. Additionally, the publisher may contact you directly.
If the publisher has granted your request to access hidden data, you will receive a notification in your Quantcast account. Once you’ve been granted access, viewing the reports is as easy as going to that publisher’s profile. The data that was previously hidden will now become visible (you must be logged into your Quantcast account). Note that the publisher may at anytime recall data access rights.
I requested a site get Quantified via the “Request site Quantify” link. When will the site data be directly measured?
There is no guarantee that a publisher will get their site Quantified based on your request. Publishers must choose to participate in order to be directly measured with Quantcast Measure. Our “Request site Quantify” link is aimed at enabling anyone in the industry to communicate directly with a publisher to make them aware of their interest in having improved audience insights available.
Why is my Quantcast Quantified data different from what panel-centric syndicated services report?
Quantcast provides Quantified Publishers with audience data based on directly measured census level traffic. As a result, Quantcast audience data should align with a publishers’ internal reporting. Syndicated services typically report data based on panels, projecting a publishers’ total traffic off a small subset of their actual traffic.
The syndicated services may also be reporting different aggregations of domains, subdomains or even specific pages. As a result, traffic assignments may not line up between services. In such an environment, resulting data is not an exact apples to apples comparison.
Another possible difference – Quantcast audience data is visit weighted, which may not be the case for other services which could report traffic on basic audience composition.
Why don’t the numbers for my site align with my internal statistics?
If you’re not a Quantified Publisher then we’re only able to present estimates for your audience, and it’s entirely possible that these estimates aren’t very good. Quantcast’s system is collaborative and publishers can participate in our continuing effort to offer the most accurate data available by joining Quantcast Measure free of charge. This program incorporates your real site traffic into the audience calculations thus offering the highest degree of accuracy.
I’m a Quantified Publisher, why isn’t my data matching up with my internal analytics?
When properly implemented, Quantcast data will line up very closely with the most common web analytics packages. There are several common problems that account for the vast majority of issues with data alignment.
- Your tag is not placed on every page of your site. In order for us to accurately measure your site, it is essential that the tag be placed on all pages – consider putting it in a common footer file.
- You are recently Quantified. If we don’t have 30 days worth of data on your website or network, we attempt to project our metrics based on the data that we have seen. For instance, if you Quantified your site on a day with very low traffic, it’s likely that our 30 day projection will appear lower than your actual site traffic. These numbers will converge on your true traffic as we gather more data. An easy way to make sure we are seeing all of your traffic is to log into your Quantcast account, open your profile, and visit the Traffic tab. Click ‘Download traffic stats’ and ensure that the daily pageviews align fairly closely with your internal analytics.
- Your tag has been removed or mal-formed since Quantification — often times our tag is accidentally removed, or altered in a way that interferes with its correct operation, by accident. If you’re experiencing a sudden change in traffic, please ensure that the tag on your site is exactly as it appears in the ‘Network & Settings’ tab of your account, and ensure that it remains on all of the pages of your site.
- You’re using server log data that is counting unique IP addresses. This methodology tends to overstate the number of people visiting a site, as the same Internet user’s IP can change frequently for a large variety of reasons. Quantcast will also not count bots or spiders visiting your website, whereas the IP based methodology will.
- Terminology varies slightly between different analytics packages. Typically, ‘Pageviews’ is counted fairly evenly across different analytics platforms (although they may appear higher when spider and crawler pageviews are being counted), so typically that is the best metric to use when comparing results. If there is a large difference between the pageviews Quantcast is reporting and the pageviews your analytics package is reporting, it’s typically indicative of a faulty implementation.
Why isn’t my profile displaying demographic/geographic/lifestyle/business data?
Quantcast takes enormous care to provide quality, accurate information. As a result, we will not display information until is passes our rigorous standards and tests. Often this means that we won’t be able to provide demographic information for smaller sites until we have seen several weeks of traffic and occasionally a site’s audience will be too small for us to reach statistically significant conclusions. Typically, if your site attracts more than 1,000 people per month we’ll be able to generate demographic profiles, however it varies on a site-by-site basis.