Quantcast Planner FAQ
- Is Quantcast Planner free?
- What do all the column headers and categories mean?
- Where do you get your numbers from?
- Quantcast Planner is not loading in my browser, what can I do?
- The US reach of my site is much higher than what is listed in your Planner tool, why so?
- My site isn’t showing up in Quantcast Planner, why is this happening?
- Can I look at data for different periods of time within Quantcast Planner?
- When will you include non-US centric data?
- Do you have an API?
Yes, Quantcast Planner is a free service. There are no contracts to sign, or licensing fees to pay.
What do all the column headers and categories mean?
Target Reach: This column shows how many people, out of the total US online population, who fit your criteria, can be found on each site.
US Reach: This column represents how many people out of the total US internet population can be found on each site.
Coverage: This column indicates, as a percentage, how many people from the total number of people online who meet your criteria can be found on each site.
Composition Percent: This column indicates the percentage of the site’s audience that meets your criteria.
Composition Index: An index is a measure of how a given metric compares to an average, such as the average US 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 US 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 US 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.
Category Affinity: The category affinity column indicates the affinity score of the selected category. Affinity scores are calculated from the overlap of audiences, relative to what would be expected by chance. In general, sites with high affinities have negligible overlaps in terms of absolute numbers of people, so site affinity is not a useful indicator of other sites on which those same individuals can be found. Rather, it is most useful for finding places to reach new people similar to ones on a marker site.
Where do you get your numbers from?
Please refer to our methodology documentation here for more information about how our statistical inference model works.
Quantcast Planner is not loading in my browser, what can I do?
If you are using IE 8, it is a browser that is still in BETA and known to cause some errors when rendering certain websites. In order for you to get Quantcast Planner to work on IE 8, you need to switch to “compatibility view” which emulates the existing IE 7 functionality. To do this, click on the “Tools” menu, then select “compatibility view.” Quantcast Planner should load after doing this. If you are still experiencing issues please contact us.
The US reach of my site is much higher than what is listed in your Planner tool, why so?
The profiles for Quantified Publishers are updated on a daily basis, and the data in Quantcast Planner is updated on a monthly basis. At the very top of Quantcast Planner there is a note stating when the data was last updated: “US internet population…matching demographic target as of \——–.” For Quantified Publishers, the data within Quantcast Planner reflects the sum of directly measured traffic from the previous 30 days before the date listed. For non-quantified sites, the data reflects a rough estimate of a site’s traffic for the previous 30 days.
My site isn’t showing up in Quantcast Planner, why is this happening?
In your account settings there is an option ‘searchable by advertisers’ that must have a check box in it for your site to show up in a query within Quantcast Planner.
Can I look at data for different periods of time within Quantcast Planner?
Currently, the only way to view data is for the previous thirty days of traffic for the month prior to when the data was updated. For example if the data in the site was last updated on October 31, 2008 then the data for all the sites reflects traffic and demographics from October 1 – October 31, 2008. We definitely see the value in being able to define specific time periods, and it is a feature that we will be incorporating into the product over time.
When will you include non-US centric data?
That is a feature that is on our product road map and you can expect it to be incorporated over time. However, in the interim, if there are particular sites that you are interested in working with, you could ask them to join our free Quantified Publisher program to get census-level data for those sites.
Currently, we don’t have an API available.
