So a friend at work asked if I knew anything about Quantcast, a website demographics tool. I had never heard of it, so I pulled up my most popular site (Fake Name Generator) to see if it was accurate.
It wasn’t.
The traffic portion of the stats showed my site as getting less than 5% of its actual traffic. I don’t know the demographics of my site (are my visitors male or female? rich? poor? educated?), but considering the traffic estimate was so far off, I’m assuming this number was wrong, too.
I peeked at the FAQ to see how the site works, and was told I could add a snippet of JavaScript to my site to get accurate stats. So I did. The next day, nothing changed. The next day, my stats were completely gone. I thought that was rather odd… You do what they say, and they take away your stats.
But I decided to persevere. It didn’t hurt me any to have a pinch of JS on my site, so why remove it now? Finally, after a full week, there are stats for my site. The traffic stats are more accurate (but still a bit different than Google Analytics reports). Some of the reports are still unavailable, and I have no idea how accurate the demographics are.
Anyways, feel free to check out my site’s profile at Quantast. I’ve set all the data to “public” so you can see what kind of information they provide on a “Quantified” site.
I’m still on the fence as to the accuracy of their demographics. What do you think?