Quantcast -- Audience Measurement, Lookalike Modeling, Audience Buying

Analytics tools can be very powerful and helpful for discovering information about a website or app to get a picture of user interaction within the product. This helps publishers make more informed content and product decisions.

But analyzing traffic metrics without knowing your audience only tells half the story. The term “analytics” is often used synonymously with “audience measurement.” Though the two are complementary, there are differences:

In analytics, the publisher monitors traffic and navigation patterns within its product or property. Analysis of those numbers can contribute to better flow within the site or app, increased engagement, and overall satisfaction.

Audience measurement, as the name indicates, provides insight into audiences. It’s information about who is visiting as well as how many people. By attaching a customer profile (demographics, frequency of visits, income, education, location) to otherwise unidentified unique visitors, the metrics become more meaningful.

Larger publishers have historically used audience measurement metrics to attract advertising partners. But audience measurement can also play an important role in product development and audience acquisition strategies by providing deeper insight into audiences, interests, and broader media consumption behaviors.

Using audience measurement metrics alongside directly measured traffic trends helps publishers provide a clear picture of their users to advertisers and also adjust promotions, tactics, and business strategies dynamically.

In our next post in this series, we’ll discuss different approaches to audience measurement and provide more insights on how these tools can complement your existing analytics solution.

If you’re not already using Quantcast Measure for direct audience measurement of both your web and mobile properties, read more about Quantcast Measure here. Implementation is quick and straightforward, and results are shown in one place for a holistic picture.

Ahead of this year’s Mobile Engage conference, Konrad Feldman, Co-founder & CEO of Quantcast, gives his views on key issues in the mobile space.

This year may be the first time that more time is spent online via mobile devices than through PCs. What does this mean for your business?

The way people are consuming media is indeed changing, with tablets and smartphones making up an increasing portion of engagement. In 2012, global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent, and it is projected that by the end of 2013, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on Earth.

As a result, publishers, app developers and marketers alike need a more accurate way to measure across all platforms (desktop, mobile web, apps) and get a clear, unified view of their digital audiences to better understand, serve and monetise them. For Quantcast, this is our sweet spot. We’re committed to providing the best understanding of digital audiences, regardless of where they consume media. We introduced mobile web measurement over one year ago, and with the recent launch of Quantcast Measure for Apps, we now provide a single unified view of audiences across desktop web, mobile web and apps.

What are the key challenges in mobile at the moment? Why?

While the browser is still the most popular app on most smartphones, independent apps continue to gain widespread popularity. In just the month of February, there were over 60,000 new apps introduced to the market.

With this in mind, the biggest challenge for the industry centres around cross-platform measurement. As consumers switch between devices, there is increased need to consider all media consumption to effectively understand and audiences are create relevant experiences for all audiences (and, of course, to monetise their engagement with your content effectively). Because mobile measurement has traditionally included less granularity than we have grown used to on the web, cross-platform monetization is challenging. There exists a general lack of demographic data and no consistent methodology for measuring across platforms, which has left publishers and advertisers with a conundrum.

Consumers are fragmented, volatile and dynamic, yet providing provide rich, sticky consumer experiences, and monetizing those effectively requires that you understand who those consumers are and how they are, holistically, consuming your content. Finding an accurate, directly measured solution is essential to solving this challenge.

Where are the key opportunities in mobile at the moment? Why?

Cross-platform measurement technologies are needed to give publishers a more holistic understanding of campaign reach and engagement and to give advertisers an accurate view of opportunities across multiplatform publishers.

If both buyers and sellers can better understand the entire audience, across platforms, then it will be easier to organise, buy and sell these audiences. That reduces costs for both buyers and sellers, increases yield and return, and delivers more relevant experiences for consumers.

What will the mobile marketing landscape look like in five years’ time?

From a media perspective, in the future I believe we won’t be talking about mobile. The landscape will be just digital; mobile will be folded into the overall digital mix. This has already started to happen: mobile is now included into the overall IAB Ad Spend 2013. Mobile is a connected device just like your desktop PC and should now be considered in the same way.

What is your top tip for anyone looking to get more involved in mobile?

Digital ad spend is now over £5.5 billion, and over £500 million of that is spent on mobile. If you’re not focused on mobile right now, you’re behind. The industry is now paying attention and actively working to develop solutions that will improve the ad opportunities and experiences here, so our top tip would be to not wait, but start to experiment and start learning.

Quantified mobile app publishers logging in to monitor their mobile app metrics last week may have noticed that we now differentiate between new app installs and version upgrades via a new tab in our reporting dashboard.

Differentiating between new installs and upgrades allows publishers to better interpret their new user base and evaluate existing users’€™ loyalty and willingness to upgrade. Previously, install metrics (new installs and upgrades) were shown in a bundle. As such, it was easy to assume that the number of installs equated to the number of new users.

Both Android and iOS versions of a single app title are shown in the same traffic graph, allowing publishers to compare and tell a story. Users can also flip between the graphs under “More Options” to see top versions. This allows a publisher to see how different versions of iOS and Android stack up against each other in terms of their Uniques, Visits, Installs and Upgrades.

In the past few weeks, Bitcoin has received a lot of attention in the media and from investors. Much less attention has been bestowed upon those who actually use this curious currency.

Relative Bitcoin Interest

We at Quantcast are all about measuring audiences; we’re also no strangers to a mining conversation over a delicious catered lunch. We dug a bit (no pun) to get some info about these masked coin collectors (we’ll call them Bitcoiners), using the vast visibility we have into habits of consumers on the Internet. This is what our proprietary data showed:

Despite rumors of the Winklevoss twins cornering the Bitcoin market, Bitcoiners skew only ever so slightly wealthier than the average population.

Bitcoiners do, however, skew young. More significantly, they tend to be very male.

It’s unsurprising that Bitcoiners have a lot of interest in technology-related terms…

… And tend to hail from universities, especially from institutions heavy on engineering, such as RIT, MIT, Cal, and University of Waterloo up in Canada.

Want information like this for your audience, website, network, campaign? Then get Quantified today for free!

Posted by Ksenya Gusak, Head of Sales Insights, and Mark Cooper, Engineering Manager – Measurement

“Why Quantcast?” That’s a question I’m frequently asked by co-workers and friends. “Why them?”

By way of a quick background, I had previously worked at Google, starting in February 2000. Back then, the would-be search giant had less than 100 employees and virtually no revenue. The engineers had just completed beta-testing the start-up’s foray into advertising. I was hired as Google’s first ad exec and was charged with building a team of senior advertising sales leaders with industry-specific expertise (e.g., automotive, finance, etc.). For the next seven years, I did my part to help Google grow its ad revenues from zero to many, many millions of dollars.

At the IAB Mobile Marketplace conference yesterday we saw and heard about the different ways in which media is consumed. People are accessing content across multiple devices and, more than ever, while on the go. While the browser is still the most popular app on most smartphones, apps by publishers are continuing to gain popularity. In just the month of February, there were almost 67,000 new apps introduced to the four dominant operating systems.

For publishers and advertisers, mobile apps add yet another dimension to the data needed for buy and sell sides to gain a complete understanding of complex audience behavior.

Most cross-platform publishers have business models based on monetizing audiences, and given the significance of mobile, it’s more crucial than ever to provide solid measurement and tools to help monetize these mobile audiences. In response, cross-platform measurement technologies are needed to give publishers a more holistic understanding of campaign reach and engagement and to give advertisers an accurate view of insights across multiplatform publishers. Specifically, we believe that in order to understand, segment and act on digital audiences in a cross-platform world, the first thing you need to do is collect quality data to measure them, with the real-time nature of this measurement being paramount. Due to the high level of volatility with apps, it is even more important that measurement is directly integrated in order to get a truly accurate view of usage.

For close to seven years, Quantcast Measure has been the pioneer and industry standard for free direct audience measurement on the web, which means that rather than using a panel-based approach, we directly measure your audiences. In 2011 we expanded Quantcast Measure to include Mobile Web and in March we introduced Quantcast Measure for Apps – completing the trifecta of insight into cross-platform audience trends. We hope that you’re as excited about this product as we are and look forward to the future of what it means for mobile marketing.

Our Compare Site feature is back! And we’re excited to reintroduce it with a cleaner look. The Quantcast Compare Site feature allows side-by-side comparison of up to four publishers, showcasing Uniques, People, Visits, and Page Views in one place.

What does it look like in action? The example below demonstrates comparing four different sites: a Q&A site, a dating site, a cooking site, and a news site. We can see that traffic to the news site spikes on Mondays, while dating and cooking hold steady throughout the week. By switching to the Visits and Page Views tabs, we can understand usage intensity by comparing ratios like Visits per Uniques between the sites. Comparing sites with Quantcast provides useful information for competitive evaluation, gathering a correlation between categories or sites, or interpreting patterns throughout the week.

To access our Compare Site functionality, go to Quantcast.com and go to any site’s profile page from the search box at the top. Once the data from a Quantified site appears, click on the gray “Compare Site” button at the top right of the graph and add up to three other sites to compare to the one you’re viewing.

Check it out today to see how your favorite sites stack up!

The availability of content anywhere and the rapidly increasing number of devices people use have changed the landscape for publishers, developers and advertisers dramatically. The world has gone mobile, and people are spending more of their time on mobile devices and accessing content through mobile apps. Mobile devices and apps are now a feature of everyday life; in fact, it is projected that by the end of 2013, the number of mobile devices will exceed the number of people on earth and that close to 2 million apps will be available across the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Publishers and app developers need an accurate way to measure across all platforms (desktop, mobile web, apps) to get a clear, unified view of their digital audiences. Most cross-platform publishers monetize their audiences — and they need a cross-platform measurement solution that can help them validate and demonstrate their audiences across all screens. During conversations with our publishers, the same questions kept coming up:

To address these questions and shifting media consumption patterns, we developed Quantcast Measure for Apps and are excited to announce its availability today. This is very significant for us as a company, and for the hundreds of thousands of publishers we work with. Quantcast aims to be the leader in understanding audiences across all platforms and delivering the most effective advertising experience on all screens. As publishers have extended their reach to mobile apps and mobile devices, they need a way to effectively understand their audiences.

Several of our partners are already publicizing their profiles, including mobile app data — check out Topix, Goodreads, and Big Oven, and expect many more in the coming months!

The first release of Measure for Apps is just the beginning. As with Quantcast Measure, we will continue to enhance the product and provide additional features in upcoming releases. Get it here today for free: www.quantcast.com/apps.

Facebook has been offering a new conversion tracking system to advertisers for the past several months. In their recent earnings call, COO Sheryl Sandberg cited this data and revealed a very interesting insight about the path to conversion for Facebook users:

“Of all the users who bought a product they saw advertised on Facebook, 99% of them didn’t click on the ad.”

Sandberg’s comments echoed the position taken by our CEO, Konrad Feldman, in a recent whitepaper on clicks vs. views – that display advertising cannot be accurately measured or optimized through clicks.

In fact, the profiles of people who click on display ads are critically different from people who become actual converters. In a sense, optimizing for clickers is “anti-optimal.”

It is clear that the path to a purchase, or conversion event, is never a straight line. When marketers focus only on click-based conversions, they are ignoring the increasingly important and significant contribution of conversions that happen based on viewing an ad. Only when marketers put more emphasis on conversions rather than clicks does a fuller picture begin to emerge.

View the full whitepaper here.

We are happy to announce that Quantcast has acquired MakeGood, a software company focusing on reconciliation and reporting of digital advertising campaigns.

Founded in 2009 and based in Seattle, MakeGood started out with a simple mission: build great software to process and report on the success of ad campaigns.

The increasingly complex nature of real-time advertising means advertisers require better tools to properly understand and attribute ad campaign success and optimize their budgets. A significant portion of advertising technology development has focused on automation and optimization related to the delivery of individual impressions, but industry participants also face significant complexity in aggregating, organizing and reconciling campaign data to form a “single view of truth” in order to make critical business decisions.

In 2012 we surveyed the market, identifying and examining tools we might use to enhance our integration of campaign-related data and our associated reporting suite. We were very impressed by what the team at MakeGood had created. Their understanding of complex multi-system reconciliation and reporting was immense, and the elegant software they had created delivered a high degree of automation for this central industry challenge.

The MakeGood team and the software they have created will accelerate our ability to provide more in-depth and user-friendly reporting on ad campaigns delivered by Quantcast Advertise to our advertiser and media agency clients.

I’m delighted to welcome MakeGood CEO Jeff Coon and his colleagues to the Quantcast team. Here’s what Jeff had to say: “We couldn’t be more thrilled to be joining Quantcast and to bring the advantages of the MakeGood software suite to the industry through Quantcast’s broadly adopted products.”

We’ll continue to execute on our strategy of providing the most effective advertising and best understanding of digital audiences through our Advertise and Measure products. MakeGood will help us expand our capabilities and deliver exceptional advertising solutions that are easy to use to all of our customers.

Konrad Feldman, Co-founder and CEO