How to Get Traffic Analytics for a Website You Don't Own
Get data about the website, if available, at https://www.quantcast.com/., Use the following rules of thumb when judging whether the website you are looking for (or similar websites) would have Quantcast data available., Examine the various parts of...
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Get data about the website
This service is free and provides direct measurement, but it's available for some websites only.
For instance, for the website Trello, with domain name trello.com, you can get data at https://www.quantcast.com/trello.com.Similarly, for the website Glassdoor, with domain name glassdoor.com, you can get data at https://www.quantcast.com/glassdoor.com.In case of subdomains, you should enter the subdomain name instead of the domain.
For instance, for the Math Stack Exchange (math.stackexchange.com), you would look for data at https://www.quantcast.com/math.stackexchange.com.There are two kinds of websites: those that use Quantcast Measure (that Quantcast calls "quantified"), and those that do not.
For websites that use Quantcast Measure, you will see the website name and a check mark in front of the name on top, and website traffic data below.
For websites that do not use Quantcast Measure you will see a message on top of the form: "<website> is not currently using Quantcast Measure.
As a result, we're unable to show you a full breakout of their audience data.
If you own or work at <website> sign up for Quantcast Measure and place the measurement tag on your site to get all the audience insights detailed below." Previously, Quantcast used to show indirectly estimated data for sufficiently high-traffic websites not using Quantcast Measure, but now it does not show this data.
For websites that do use Quantcast Measure, some sections of the traffic report may not be visible.
There are two typical reasons for this: (a) the website owner has opted out of making that section of the traffic report visible, and (b) there is too little data to populate that section of the report (for websites with reasonable traffic, this generally happens only if the website turned on Quantcast Measure less than 30 days ago).
For each hidden part of the traffic report, a message explaining that the section is hidden, along with the reason, is displayed at the part of the page where the section would have shown up.
The message shown for (a) is "This publisher has not made the data in this report publicly available.
If this is your profile, make sure you are logged in to view this report." The message shown for (b) is "Not enough data has been collected to populate this report.
If you're the admin of this profile and believe this is an error, see our implementation guide for troubleshooting tips." In case you get the error message (a), check archive.is for older versions of the page.
You might be able to locate an older version when the publisher had not restricted access to the data.
However, versions stored in archive.is will not have full functionality.
Examples of websites that used to show public data but do not now are:
Twitch.tv,and CNN.Note that you cannot use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) because this does not archive Quantcast reports.
So you must use archive.is for looking up data. -
Step 2: if available
Most of the websites that share data with Quantcast and allow Quantcast to show the data publicly tend to be media websites whose business model is advertising-based.
Moreover, most of them are either based in on have a significant presence in the United States, since Quantcast data is most reliable and most useful to show to advertisers for United States audiences.
In particular, if the topic of your website is not one that media companies and publishing groups have interest in, it can be hard to find examples to benchmark against.
Another thing to keep in mind regarding the availability of Quantcast data is that the decision to share data with Quantcast is made at the level of the media company or publishing group, rather than the individual website.
Therefore, either all (or most) of the websites under a given publishing group would have QM data publicly visible, or none would.
Some publishing groups and companies that have publicly available QM data for most of their sites include: the Stack Exchange Network (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), Tegna, Woven Digital (Uproxx, Brobible, and some other male-focused humor and celebrity news sites), Vox Media Network (Vox, Eater, Racked, and a few other sites), Onion Media Network (The Onion and sister sites), COED Media Group Network (COED, College Candy, and Busted Coverage), Bonnier Corporation Network (many outdoors sporting sites as well as popsci.com), and Idle Media (HipHopEarly and sister sites).
Some publishers that do not use Quantcast Measure or do not share the data publicly include Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time Inc.
Image-sharing sites (such as Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat) all have publicly available Quantcast Measure data.
However, it doesn't hurt to check even if you don't expect the website to share data using Quantcast Measure.
For instance, Trelloand Glassdoorboth use Quantcast Measure though they don't fit the "publisher" stereotype perfectly. , The first section of the traffic report is the Traffic Card, showing total uniques, views, and visits over a time range of your choosing, and at a granularity of day, week, or 30 day.
Uniques are available only over time periods of a day, week, or 30 days.
Data is available only from the point in time the website started using Quantcast Measure.
Data is broken down as United States and non-United States.
The timezone is chosen based on the place where the majority of traffic to the website comes from; for most websites that use Quantcast Measure, this is the United States, and the timezone is Mexico City's timezone (as that it close to the average of the various US timezones).
The traffic numbers are based on direct, first-party measurement (using Quantcast's JavaScript installed on the website, that works in a similar way as Google Analytics).
It therefore measures all traffic by users on browsers that can run JavaScript and are not using an ad blocker setting that blocks analytics tools.
The numbers shown here can be compared with the numbers shown in Google Analytics, though they may not exactly match.
The second section of the traffic report is the Demographics Card.
This includes gender, age buckets, education level, and race.
Unlike the traffic card, the demographics card is not based purely on direct measurement: it is based on a mix of measurement and extrapolation, where the demographic characteristics of each visitor are estimated based on a variety of visitor-specific signals.
Quantcast uses seed data from a panel of users who have disclosed all the relevant demographic data about themselves.
Some of the data is only available for the United States subset of the audience.
You can click on "View Details" at the bottom left for more information.
The gender and age data here can be compared with the gender and age data shown in Google Analytics, at Audience > Demographics > Gender and Audience > Demographics > Age respectively.
The other characteristics are not reported in Google Analytics.
Also of interest is the Geographic Card (reports top countries and cities sending traffic).
This can be expanded to show more information using the "View Details" at the bottom left.
Of these, the Geographic Card can be compared against corresponding data in Google Analytics under Audience > Geo > Location.
The Engagement Card can be compared against the data in Google Analytics under Audience > Cohort Analysis.
However, the displays do not precisely match.
Other relevant sections include:
Cross-Platform Card (compares user behavior across platforms) and Engagement Card (segments users based on number of visits and reports counts in each segment; note that this is visible only to logged in users but does not require payment).
The General Interests Card near the bottom contains a list of similar websites visited by users who visit the website.
These can be useful to obtain benchmarks to compare site traffic against.
The links point to the Quantcast pages for the websites; however, not every website listed uses Quantcast Measure. , Websites may take themselves off of Quantcast Measure, or may stop making their data publicly visible.
So you should save or screenshot the page, or record any data you need to, while you can access the data.
You can request archival of the existing report using archive.is.
Note that the archived page will not have the full functionality of the original page because of limitations in the way archival interacts with JavaScript. , If the website owner is not using Quantcast Measure, consider contacting the website owner proposing it.
If the website owner is using Quantcast Measure, and has not made the data available, consider contacting the website owner regarding making the data publicly available.
However, since Quantcast Measure makes data publicly visible by default, website owners who choose to hide the data are usually convinced of the superiority of doing so, and you may not be persuasive. -
Step 3: at https://www.quantcast.com/<domainname>.
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Step 4: Use the following rules of thumb when judging whether the website you are looking for (or similar websites) would have Quantcast data available.
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Step 5: Examine the various parts of the traffic report.
-
Step 6: Record any data you want to reference in the future.
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Step 7: Consider contacting the website owner to request making the data publicly available.
Detailed Guide
This service is free and provides direct measurement, but it's available for some websites only.
For instance, for the website Trello, with domain name trello.com, you can get data at https://www.quantcast.com/trello.com.Similarly, for the website Glassdoor, with domain name glassdoor.com, you can get data at https://www.quantcast.com/glassdoor.com.In case of subdomains, you should enter the subdomain name instead of the domain.
For instance, for the Math Stack Exchange (math.stackexchange.com), you would look for data at https://www.quantcast.com/math.stackexchange.com.There are two kinds of websites: those that use Quantcast Measure (that Quantcast calls "quantified"), and those that do not.
For websites that use Quantcast Measure, you will see the website name and a check mark in front of the name on top, and website traffic data below.
For websites that do not use Quantcast Measure you will see a message on top of the form: "<website> is not currently using Quantcast Measure.
As a result, we're unable to show you a full breakout of their audience data.
If you own or work at <website> sign up for Quantcast Measure and place the measurement tag on your site to get all the audience insights detailed below." Previously, Quantcast used to show indirectly estimated data for sufficiently high-traffic websites not using Quantcast Measure, but now it does not show this data.
For websites that do use Quantcast Measure, some sections of the traffic report may not be visible.
There are two typical reasons for this: (a) the website owner has opted out of making that section of the traffic report visible, and (b) there is too little data to populate that section of the report (for websites with reasonable traffic, this generally happens only if the website turned on Quantcast Measure less than 30 days ago).
For each hidden part of the traffic report, a message explaining that the section is hidden, along with the reason, is displayed at the part of the page where the section would have shown up.
The message shown for (a) is "This publisher has not made the data in this report publicly available.
If this is your profile, make sure you are logged in to view this report." The message shown for (b) is "Not enough data has been collected to populate this report.
If you're the admin of this profile and believe this is an error, see our implementation guide for troubleshooting tips." In case you get the error message (a), check archive.is for older versions of the page.
You might be able to locate an older version when the publisher had not restricted access to the data.
However, versions stored in archive.is will not have full functionality.
Examples of websites that used to show public data but do not now are:
Twitch.tv,and CNN.Note that you cannot use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) because this does not archive Quantcast reports.
So you must use archive.is for looking up data.
Most of the websites that share data with Quantcast and allow Quantcast to show the data publicly tend to be media websites whose business model is advertising-based.
Moreover, most of them are either based in on have a significant presence in the United States, since Quantcast data is most reliable and most useful to show to advertisers for United States audiences.
In particular, if the topic of your website is not one that media companies and publishing groups have interest in, it can be hard to find examples to benchmark against.
Another thing to keep in mind regarding the availability of Quantcast data is that the decision to share data with Quantcast is made at the level of the media company or publishing group, rather than the individual website.
Therefore, either all (or most) of the websites under a given publishing group would have QM data publicly visible, or none would.
Some publishing groups and companies that have publicly available QM data for most of their sites include: the Stack Exchange Network (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), Tegna, Woven Digital (Uproxx, Brobible, and some other male-focused humor and celebrity news sites), Vox Media Network (Vox, Eater, Racked, and a few other sites), Onion Media Network (The Onion and sister sites), COED Media Group Network (COED, College Candy, and Busted Coverage), Bonnier Corporation Network (many outdoors sporting sites as well as popsci.com), and Idle Media (HipHopEarly and sister sites).
Some publishers that do not use Quantcast Measure or do not share the data publicly include Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time Inc.
Image-sharing sites (such as Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat) all have publicly available Quantcast Measure data.
However, it doesn't hurt to check even if you don't expect the website to share data using Quantcast Measure.
For instance, Trelloand Glassdoorboth use Quantcast Measure though they don't fit the "publisher" stereotype perfectly. , The first section of the traffic report is the Traffic Card, showing total uniques, views, and visits over a time range of your choosing, and at a granularity of day, week, or 30 day.
Uniques are available only over time periods of a day, week, or 30 days.
Data is available only from the point in time the website started using Quantcast Measure.
Data is broken down as United States and non-United States.
The timezone is chosen based on the place where the majority of traffic to the website comes from; for most websites that use Quantcast Measure, this is the United States, and the timezone is Mexico City's timezone (as that it close to the average of the various US timezones).
The traffic numbers are based on direct, first-party measurement (using Quantcast's JavaScript installed on the website, that works in a similar way as Google Analytics).
It therefore measures all traffic by users on browsers that can run JavaScript and are not using an ad blocker setting that blocks analytics tools.
The numbers shown here can be compared with the numbers shown in Google Analytics, though they may not exactly match.
The second section of the traffic report is the Demographics Card.
This includes gender, age buckets, education level, and race.
Unlike the traffic card, the demographics card is not based purely on direct measurement: it is based on a mix of measurement and extrapolation, where the demographic characteristics of each visitor are estimated based on a variety of visitor-specific signals.
Quantcast uses seed data from a panel of users who have disclosed all the relevant demographic data about themselves.
Some of the data is only available for the United States subset of the audience.
You can click on "View Details" at the bottom left for more information.
The gender and age data here can be compared with the gender and age data shown in Google Analytics, at Audience > Demographics > Gender and Audience > Demographics > Age respectively.
The other characteristics are not reported in Google Analytics.
Also of interest is the Geographic Card (reports top countries and cities sending traffic).
This can be expanded to show more information using the "View Details" at the bottom left.
Of these, the Geographic Card can be compared against corresponding data in Google Analytics under Audience > Geo > Location.
The Engagement Card can be compared against the data in Google Analytics under Audience > Cohort Analysis.
However, the displays do not precisely match.
Other relevant sections include:
Cross-Platform Card (compares user behavior across platforms) and Engagement Card (segments users based on number of visits and reports counts in each segment; note that this is visible only to logged in users but does not require payment).
The General Interests Card near the bottom contains a list of similar websites visited by users who visit the website.
These can be useful to obtain benchmarks to compare site traffic against.
The links point to the Quantcast pages for the websites; however, not every website listed uses Quantcast Measure. , Websites may take themselves off of Quantcast Measure, or may stop making their data publicly visible.
So you should save or screenshot the page, or record any data you need to, while you can access the data.
You can request archival of the existing report using archive.is.
Note that the archived page will not have the full functionality of the original page because of limitations in the way archival interacts with JavaScript. , If the website owner is not using Quantcast Measure, consider contacting the website owner proposing it.
If the website owner is using Quantcast Measure, and has not made the data available, consider contacting the website owner regarding making the data publicly available.
However, since Quantcast Measure makes data publicly visible by default, website owners who choose to hide the data are usually convinced of the superiority of doing so, and you may not be persuasive.
About the Author
Sophia Griffin
Brings years of experience writing about DIY projects and related subjects.
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