- Addicts
- Addicts are the hardcore segment of a site's audience, who have 30
or more visits to that site in a month. While typically accounting for a very small
percentage of the site's total reach these
users can easily account for the majority of all site visits.
- Audience Composition
- Audience Composition describes the relative proportion of a site's
audience according to three types of visitor defined by the number of
visits they make to a site during a month. The three types of visitor
are Passers-By, Regulars and Addicts.
- Audience Keywords
- The audience keywords list shows keywords a site's audience tends to
type in. These are often but not always the keywords that brought people
to the site. The frequency represents how much more often members of
this audience use those keywords compared to an average internet user.
- Confidence
- The Confidence Bar indicates the relative level of confidence Quantcast
has in numbers that are presented. Generally speaking, the more data
we have to analyze the more confident we can be about our estimate. Only
Quantified Publishers can achieve the highest score of 5.
- Demographic
- Demographics are attributes and associated values that characterize
a group of individuals. Demographic attributes include gender, age, income,
ethnicity and educational attainment. Wikipedia contains a more detailed
description of demographics. Quantcast displays demographics in two ways:
as pie charts representing absolute percentages and as bar charts representing
audience composition relative to the U.S. internet average (see the index
explanation below).
- Impression
- An impression represents a measured publisher event. An impression can
include full page views, ad impressions, widget impressions, and flash videos.
- Index
- A measure of how a given metric compares to an average, such as the
average U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
- Measurement Pixels
- Measurement pixels are snippets of javascript code that site publishers
can opt to embed in their pages. When a visitor to a Quantified
publisher's site downloads a page, the javascript requests an invisible
1x1-pixel image file from Quantcast's servers. We don't collect any personally-identifiable
information and the performance impact on the web page is negligible,
but the pixel allows us to measure the site's traffic directly rather
than infer it from other data sources. The result is a more accurate
picture of the audience of the site.
- Panel
- A group of individuals/households for whom internet browsing activity
is observed and correlated with a range of known demographic indicators.
Quantcast combines panel observations with proprietary inference mechanisms
to produce the numbers you see on this site. Panels are small relative
to the internet as a whole (a one million individual/household panel
is considered very big), so we apply statistical techniques to correct
the numbers to account for differences between the make up on the panel
and Internet users as a whole. We think we do a great job of this, but
ultimately a panel is no substitute for the very accurate figures that
can be achieved through site-side
measurement pixels such as those we provide for Quantified
Publishers.
- Passers By
- A term used to define a segment of a sites audience that aren't repeat
visitors, but rather have a single visit over
the course of a month. Certain sites may get a very high volume of Passers
By who are directed to that site on the basis of, for example, a news
article but have no reason to return once they have read the piece that
is referenced. Typically Passers By can account for a large amount of
the reach that a site has, but
a small fraction of the total visits.
- Popular/Other Subdomains
- The popular/other subdomains list highlights the other subdomains of
a site that attract the most visitors. Each is expressed a percentage
of the total number of visitors to a site.
- Pseudo Rank
- The Pseudo Rank provides a rank equivalent for web destinations that
are not themselves a top level domain. The pseudo rank indicates the
rank position the subdomain would hold if it were a completely separate
site.
- Publisher's Corner
- A summary section on each Quantcast profile dedicated to the site's
publisher. Associated with this is a full page where the publisher of
a featured web property can describe their site, audience and future
plans.
- Publisher Profile
- A Quantified Publisher who has quantified multiple sites can create
a publisher profile that rolls them all up as a single virtual
site. A publisher profile looks similar to a site profile but displays
stats for the aggregate audience. For example, visitor counts refer to
the non-duplicated visitors across all the sites. You can create, configure,
or delete your publisher profile from your Sites
page after you've quantified a second site.
- Quantified Publisher
- A Quantified publisher is a site whose webmaster has employed site-side tagging using a Quantcast tag. These tags allow us to monitor the site's
traffic directly rather than inferring it from other data sources. The
numbers we present for Quantified publishers are thus considerably more
accurate than those for non-Quantified publishers. Find our more about becoming
a Quantified publisher.
- Reach
- A measure of the number of people visiting a site over a defined time
period. Unless stated otherwise, Quantcast reach figures relate to a
whole calendar month.
- Regulars
- Regulars refers to a segment of a site's audience that frequent a site
more than once per month but not as much as Addicts who
frequent a site 30 or more times per month.
- Session
- A period of internet browsing. During a session a visitor may visit
many web sites and many pages on any given site. Quantcast records a
session for a particular site if a visitor accesses one or more pages
on a given site within a session.
- Similar Audience
- The similar audience list displays the other internet destinations
that visitors to a particular site have a strong affinity for. The affinity
score shows the strength of the affinity relative to the whole U.S. internet
population. Affinities are purely statistical correlations and say nothing
about why sites' audiences might be similar. The sites might have similar
content, or one might drive traffic to the other, or there might be another
reason for the overlap.
- Siteographic™
- Siteographic™ shows other sites an audience frequents,
which can reveal brand preferences and other lifestyle traits. The Siteographic
section of a site's profile shows other sites that the audience is likely
to visit, and the affinity indicates how much more likely than average.
For example, if the profile for wsj.com listed barrons.com with an affinity
of 10x, a randomly chosen visitor to wsj.com is ten times likelier to
visit barrons.com than the average internet user.
- Syndicators
- The list of syndicators in a network profile shows external sites
from which people viewed the publisher's content. For example, for a
publisher of Quantified Flash videos, the syndication will show sites
embedding the videos. Google is a common syndicator of HTML content via
its cached results pages.
- Traffic Comparison
- Enter up to 5 different web destinations and the chart will allow you
to compare their performance in terms of daily numbers of unique visitors.
If you want to see how one site has performed relative to another, check
the 'Relative' box and the chart will display the percentage growth,
or decline, of traffic for each site relative to the first day in the
period.
- Tags
- Customize your measurement by adding tags. A tag is a custom rollup
which allows you to assign tags, or categories to a given page, widget,
or any other property you own. Once you have tagged your page, they will
show up on the network profile view. Tags also support heirarchies, so
you can create whatever rollup you are interested in.
- Uniques
- Uniques are a standard measure of audience size available from sophisticated
analysis tools including Quantcast. Although many tools label them "visitors," uniques
technically count the distinct cookies received from or sent to visitors
and are known to overcount visitors who delete cookies regularly. For
sites with many repeat visitors, the cookie count can exceed the true
visitor count by a factor of two or three. Publishers interested in understanding
how cookie deletion affects their audience can sign
up for Quantcast's free quantified publisher program for a detailed
analysis.
- Visit
- That part of a session which
involves activity on a single web site.