Tag Archives: media planner

Google Trends vs. Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and Comscore?

Posted on by
5

Google Trends for Websites
Google Analytics is WOW, Google Ad Planner is amazing, Google Trends – hmmm, not so much. It is as if they started to create Google Trends for Websites, heard the phone ring – answered the phone – had a long conversation, and forgot they ever started it in the first place. haha.

Do not get me wrong, I am truly amazed at most all Google products, especially when it comes to Google Analytics which is incredibly powerful. However, I am not sure what the point of the current Google Trends for Websites is. After using Quantcast, Alexa and Compete, and the pay-for-play Comscore, this makes you say ‘huh?’ Here is the basic graph you receive:

google_trends_twitter

Placeholder for World Domination?
It could very well be that Google is merely waiting for the right moment to unleash their own public web analytics after a certain threshold of Google Analytics users haev been met. Quantcast has a twofold method for providing site analytics, the traditional polling method and code on pages if the site owner opts for it (what they call quantified). Google has the same capabilities.

Google Search Bar
They can utilize their install base of the Google Search bar to obtain site analytics across the web. Much like Alexa does.

Google Analytics
Much like Quantcast, many site users have the Quantcast code on their site. This provides an accurate measurement of traffic to that site as opposed to extrapolation based on a sample size.

Sleeping Dog
Right now there is no reason to use the Google Trends for Websites, however that sleeping dog may awake, utilize Google Analytics installs and Search Bar installs to crush all others. Wow, what would that do to Comscore who charges and arm and a leg for their data? Comscore is probably not too happy about the Google Media Planner – now that is quite impressive.

Quantcast Media Planner

Posted on by
Reply

Services to measure website rankings by traffic have been around for quite some time. The most well known, as it is free, is probably Alexa. The second most well known, however a paid service and much more comprehensive and substantially more data than just site traffic, is Comscore. Others are Nielsen (paid), Compete (free) and Quantcast (free). Still there are more.

Most of the free services, such as Alexa, Compete and Quantcast have site traffic rankings based on unique visitors, page views and other statistics. Each determine statistics of a site differently, some watch which sites people visit and others have you place code on your pages (or both). Other ways to use site traffic services are not just to determine which sites have the most traffic but to determine what type of visitors each site has, whether they have content you are looking for or demographics of site visitors. This type of data used to be obtainable as paid only. In comes Quantcast.

Quantcast Media Planner
Quantcast has free tools to search through sites for you with an easy to use search query. Their results show which sites they obtain traffic data from as a third party observer and which sites have their code installed. If the code is installed there is a much better chance of having accurate data.

Sign up for a free account at Quantcast, login, and choose media planner on the upper menu. The right hand side has your search results and the left hand side has your search options.

quantcast_demographics
The searching capability is amazing. You can see from the graphic on the right that sites can be narrowed down by demographics. Categories such as Gender, Income, Age, and more are available.

These days with privacy concerns so high the amount of data that is actually collected by ad servers to serve up your ad is less than it was years ago. The data you can obtain at Quantcast is about all you can use to target ads. Therefore when determining which sites to advertise on, the Quantcast tool is a great site finder. Use these demographics to narrow your site.

quantcast_categories
You can also use, in addition to demographics, their category list to find categories to target as well. You may want to target taxes found within the financial services category.

You may then narrow search again based on the minimum or maximum number of US visitors the site reaches each month. Lastly you can export the search results into an excel spreadsheet.

Overall the Quantcast media planner is an amazing tool, especially for free.
[PSGallery=3af1w2a3d]