Use Quantcast to Learn More About Your Target Market and Competition

If you’re marketing technology or just about anything else on the Internet it is obviously important to know as much as possible about your market and your competition.  However, most of us can’t afford expensive market research.  What to do?  How about a free and easy to use online service that provides excellent market insight?  Fortunately, one such service exists. The service is quantcast.com and it IS free and very easy to use.  Here’s how easy:

1. Go to www.quantcast.com and type in the url of one of your competitors in the advanced search field.  (You don’t need to sign up or pay anything)

2. If the website you enter has sufficient volume you will be presented with three tabbed pages; Summary, Traffic, Demographics.

3. The Summary page is great since it is fairly detailed and provides an excellent view of volume, demographics, and brand / site affinities.

4. Study the Similar Audience and Audience Keywords on the bottom right of the Summary page and you will be able to determine where else your competitor’s site visitors are going on the internet and which keywords they tend to type in.

Here’s an example of how you could use Quantcast in your Web 2.0 Sales and Marketing efforts.  Let’s say you just decided to compete in the new Virtual PBX phone service market.  Your business model is designed around a web marketing channel.  You’re still learning this new space so you google "virtual pbx" and you see the following….

Google

 

  Advanced Search
  Preferences

 Web 

Results 1 - 10 of about 892,000 for virtual pbx. (0.16 seconds) 

 

  

  

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Sponsored Links

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www.onebox.com      Feature-rich premier phone system Affordable, flat monthly rate.

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Virtual PBX, the Hosted PBX system with Fortune 500 features, but low up-front costs.
www.virtualpbx.com/ - 24k - 
Cached - Similar pages

More results from virtualpbx.com »

VirtualPBX® | Small Business PBX: Virtual Phone System and Small PBX

Our Small Business PBX is a low-cost virtual phone system providing a small PBX with a big business image.
www.virtualpbx.com/services/small-business.asp - 13k - 
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Instant activation for web-enabled local virtual pbx serving 92% of all LATA’s across the nation. Most US cities are covered with the most comprehensive …
www.voicenation.com/local-virtualpbx.shtml - 27k - 
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Onebox Virtual Receptionist, a Virtual PBX solution, is an affordable, flat rate virtual phone system perfect for your small business.
www.onebox.com/ - 13k - 
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Our virtual PBX system at GotVMail with 800 numbers service gives you professional virtual office features, unique, nationwide toll free numbers, …
gotvmail.com/ - 7k - 
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toll free numbers, 800 numbers, virtual business phone system, virtual PBX, click-to-call.
www.ringcentral.com/ - 42k - 
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Looking for a virtual PBX or hosted PBX system? Our Hosted Virtual PBX Phone System comes with voice mail, Auto Attendant system, fax mail, find me follow …
www.messagingservice.com/ - 42k - 
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Get your toll-free number and 800 numbers with virtual pbx features like auto attendant, conference phone, call forwarding, internet fax and voicemail and …
www.800pbx.com/ - 32k - 
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Directory of virtual PBX services, including virtual PBX software, hosted PBX solutions, and other virtual PBX systems. Bowse our listings to find the right …
www.business.com/directory/telecommunications/businesssolutions/virtualpbx/ - 130k - 
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Mar 16, 2008 … A hosted virtual PBX VoIP service may be the solution to your business needs.
www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/143392/virtualpbxputsaprofessionalspinonvoip.html - 48k - 
Cached - Similar pages Searches related to: virtual pbx

virtual pbx reviews

 

virtual pbx voip

 

virtual pbx software

 

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Notice from the above Google search that onebox.com, gotvmail.com, and ringcentral.com come up in the top three paid ads.  So now you can go to Quantcast.com and enter each URL and compare their audiences as well as keywords.  You can draw your own conclusions from the demographics data on which buying groups are engaged in the Virtual PBX market as well as where else they spend their time on the web and which keywords they are typing to search for a resolution to their active pain.

As you can see below from Quantcast, after typing in gotvmail.com you see that 800 numbers are the primary keyword their visitors are typing.

 

Audience Keywords

 

 

KeywordAffinity

 

800 numbers

366.4x

 

gmail

4.0x

 

ups

2.4x

 

usps

2.3x

 

craigslist

1.9x

 

white pages

1.7x

 

maps

1.2x

Type onebox.com in Quantcast and you see….

 

Audience Keywords

What’s This?

 

KeywordAffinity

 

onebox

448.2x

 

free voicemail service

298.8x

 

free voicemail

246.6x

 

jobs

1.8x

 

area codes

1.7x

 

cnet

1.4x

 

http

1.3x

 

yellow pages

1.1x

Notice that onebox.com comes up first which means they must be doing a great job of advertising and drawing traffic to their site based on their name.  Since they are owned by J2 Global Communications they must have the budget for it.   Also, notice that the second keyword is free voicemail service but not 800 numbers as with gotvmail. 

Let’s check out ringcentral…

Company name comes up again and lot’s about free fax and free voicemail.  Hmmm.  You’re starting to get a pretty good picture of what the market is responding to.

Audience Keywords

What’s This?

 

Notice evoice.com in one of the similar audience listings so you search in Quantcast on them.

Audience Keywords

 

 

Plenty of references to free voicemail, internet answering machines, etc.  Also notice sweepstakes sites in the brand affinities.  The net conclusion you can draw which is pretty obvious is this is a very price sensitive market segment looking for a variety of free services included in their basic service fee.  They are buying virtual pbx services to reduce their monthly phone costs and get more for less.  Since you are a new player in this market you better be prepared for a high degree of price sensitivity and will need to attract customers with a "bigger bang for your buck" approach.  The seat of the pants approach I describe above is not intended to compete with or replace expensive / advanced market research.  However, for those of us who lack the funds for said research I think it is very cool that in a matter of minutes you can find very useful information about your target market.  Enterprise Sales Professionals in established companies can also benefit from researching competitive URLs and learning about their visitor’s interests and affinities.  In summary as you can tell I love Quantcast as a source of information to help shape your web marketing approach.  Happy surfing.

P.S. Here is information I pasted from www.quantcast.com to help you learn more about how it works.

How Quantcast Works

From Quantcast

Quantcast’s Quantified Publisher profiles are based on a uniquely holistic media measurement system that combines the best characteristics of other web audience measurement approaches.

We Start With Panel-Based Data

Most rating firms estimate web audiences the same way radio audiences were estimated 70 years ago: by surveying a sample of people and extrapolating to the larger audience.

Our estimates start the same way, with a panel of several million people who anonymously share their web usage history with us. Using statistical techniques we project which sites the rest of the U.S. web audience is visiting and publish basic profiles reflecting those estimates.

Unfortunately, panels aren’t perfect. Panels have biases, and with millions of destinations on the Web, even a panel as large as ours can’t do justice to niche audiences. So our analysis doesn’t end there.

Directly Measured Data

With publishers’ cooperation, web visits can be counted directly and accurately. Our Quantified Publisher program enables publishers to tag their sites and services for measurement free of charge. We can then gauge the actual reach, frequency and popularity of their websites, videos, widgets, games and more.

Direct measurement isn’t perfect either. Web logs ultimately measure page views, not people. Because of technical challenges like cookie deletion, it’s hard to know how many actual people are visiting, much less to get any insight about “who” they are. So we’re still not done.

A Unique, Holistic Model

We combine the directly measured data with the panel-based information and use our Mass Inference algorithm to produce refined profiles that accurately represent web audiences.

Advertisers – Find an Audience!

View detailed audience reports for millions of websites and services to find the audiences you seek and build your brand online with confidence.

Publishers – Make Your Audience Count!

Demonstrate the unique value of your audiences and attract advertisers by tagging your websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

Glossary

From Quantcast

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-ByRegulars andAddicts.
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 explanationbelow).
Flash-Based Media
Flash-based media include videos, games, widgets or any other content delivered as an Adobe Flash object. Just as web site publishers can quantify their sites for accurate measurement by embedding a Javascript tag, authors of Flash media can get accurate measurements of their viewership by embedding an ActionScript tag. Find out more about Quantifying your video and widgets.
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