One tool we like to show artists and arts organization is Quantcast. Similar in spirit to Google Analytics (also a great tool), Quantcast allows site owners to gather data about visitors to their websites. Unlike Google Analytics, the information is available to the public. If your site doesn’t receive a ton of traffic like popular commercial sites, then Quantcast doesn’t really have enough data to supply information on usage, demographics, etc. However, there is a solution! Quantcast will help you generate a code tag to paste into your site. This allows your site to be “Quantified!” If this sounds to “techie” for your liking, don’t worry. The Quantcast site/support team will help you with adding this piece of code to your site. In deed, our site has been quantified. Wanna see?
What we found out using Quantcast…
Well, our visitors are highly educated & poor. This makes sense, as according the National Endowment for the Arts’, Artist in the Workforce findings, artists are not unemployed but remain severely underemployed, despite typically having more education than other U.S. workers.
C4 Atlanta Website - Education vs. Income
We also discovered that while our online audience is majority Caucasian, the C4 Atlanta website receives above average usage from African American visitors (compared to the whole internet) at 19%.
C4 Atlanta Website Users - Ethnicity
How do they find that data? And isn’t it a little creepy?
Quantcast provides some info as to how they collect this information. If I had to guess, the info is tied to IP address and that address is tied to a physical address. They use direct measurement mixed with machine learning. The U.S. Census would be an example of direct measurement.
About creepy…
Remember the phone book? Once upon a time we could look up any person’s (unless they suppressed their contact info) address and phone number in an easy-to-use guide that made great use of very thin paper. Quantcast doesn’t reveal that information about people. It’s all aggregate. Also:
Quantcast Measurement is the first and only syndicated online traffic measurement service to gain MRC accreditation for compliance with IAB measurement standards.
That’s good. Very good.
As far as marketing is concerned, I think consumers are in control. It may not feel like it, but marketers want to get to know us. We tell them what we want advertised to us. Sometimes, we are right. Sometimes they get it right. But as we get deeper and deeper into a service economy, consumer voice is going to more important than ever. Building relationships with your patrons or audiences is key to survival. That relationship starts with understanding your core.
To review:
- Visit Quantcast
- Get a code to track info on your site
- Insert code
- Check out the marketing tips on how to use such data. Quantcast has some cool tips.
- Use the demographic info as one of many tools in your toolkit to help measure mission impact
- Have fun! Charts and graphs are pretty.
