Quantcast Helps The Media Planner

I'm a little late on this post, but I'm jumping for joy when I read this post on Quantcast called List Website by Audience Demographics with Quantcast.  You can read the review of Quantcast of what works or doesn't work and how some of the data is based on a panel while others is based on being a quantified site.  Me?  I started using it immediately to help with media planning.  Why?  My choices are for media planning:

1. Spending somewhere around $25K for access to Nielsen Net Ratings for planning data.
2. Ensuring that when publishers pitch me it includes a snapshot of their competitor sites
3. My personal experience in buying over $150 million worth of online advertising

Let's say you are trying to buy online advertising targeted to the holy grail of all financial services companies - men with money.  Personally, I wouldn't need to look them up this way because I've been buying this target for years, but let's say you are new and without Nielsen.  So after registering for free at Quantcast, hit the advanced search and you get to choose sites based on:

• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Ethnicity
• Education
• Children
• Other Quantcast metrics
• And minimum site traffic of 10M

So for this example I select, males, 35+, income $100K+, education level of college or grad school, must accept advertising, and minimum US reach of 100K.  You can sort it by reach, uniques in target, or % of audience in target.  The top 10 sites on the list by % of audience:

1. NY Times
2. CNN
3. Wunderground.com
4. USAToday
5. Comcast
6. Nextag
7. Weather.com
8. Digg
9. Orbitz
10. Travelocity

Now some of the results surprised me a little bit, but I didn't filter it by Quantcast site affinity (more on that in a sec).  However, the list is actually a good one to test for this general segment.  I was surprised regarding Travelocity and Orbitz but when I checked them out I was served a Schwab ad so somebody there thinks Travelocity is a good place to look for these types of web surfers.  BTW - the Schwab didn't appear to be a network buy based on the clicktru; they were passing through a site id variable of osq108ab_trav)

So that list is a good start, but let's say you want to dig in a little more so you look for sites that have high affinity to thestreet.com.  Everything else works nicely except you have to lower the minimum US reach to 1 million, but you get this top 10 list:

1. CNBC
2. Fool
3. Bizjournals
4. Businessweek
5. WSJ
6. Forbes
7. Reuters
8. Bloomberg
9. Edgar-online
10. Smartmoney

Now that's more like it.  So with media experience you can set up a nice media proposal for your perspective client that would look like this:

• Base plan - Yahoo Finance, Google, MSN, Street.com
• Finance Test - CNBC, Fool, Bizjournals, Businessweek, WSJ
• Personal Test - NYTimes, CNN, USAToday, Weather.com, and Travelocity

That's a good media proposal without knowing more about budgets and/or goals for ZERO COST.  You didn't need to shell out a dime to pull this data and while it requires some knowledge of the marketplace to manipulate the sorting criteria, it is probably very close to what you would have paid Nielsen or comScore.  So starting using Quantcast for your media planning today - I did.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Comments

[Annette]

I read 'alot' of blogs these days... I am not just saying this because I know you are such a cool dude... but dude, your posts really rock. This post is extremely helpful and now *I'm* jumping for joy. I'm really going to use Quantcast at this point and didn't know about it until tonight.

Cheers & thanks, AT