In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.
I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.
One advantage Quantcast provides over other traffic sites is the addition of demographic data. Gender, age, education, income and race are shown to provide a rough make-up of your visitors. You can compare these numbers to your Google Analytics data to gauge the accuracy.
Quantcast also provides other sites your audience has visited and keywords that are likely to find that site (you can never have too many competitor keyword tools).
One last piece of information that is interesting is the Traffic Frequency graphs. This displays three levels of visitor activity (addicts, regulars and passers-by) and the amount of your traffic they generate. Again, this data could be checked against Google Analytics.
All of these online tools have their issues and will provide different results, sometimes dramatically different. The best way to get a level playing field is to average data from all available sources. I have added Quantcast to the list of sources I use when researching site traffic.
Thank you Dezmon (founder of Simplifyed.com), for turning me on to Quantcast.
