Site Check – Web Site Advice

Last Friday, I wrote a quick post about QuantCast, a worldwide web traffic ranking service.

I’ve included their tracking code on all of my sites and now I’m waiting for the stats count up. The first couple of days of statistics are available on their site already.

Based on their analysis, my web sites get 1.2 million visits a month from 900,000 unique visitors. This number will continue to grow once there is enough data available.

I really like that you can group multiple web sites into a network of sites. This allows you to get the real number of visitors for your sites, excluding double counting. With other services I’ve used, I was only able to track individual sites and when some people visit several of my sites, they would be counted several times. With QuantCast, I get a better feel for the global audience of my sites.

There are still a few drawbacks with the QuantCast service, though:

• It takes a couple of days before the statistics are available
• Statistics for the previous day take between 12-24 hours to show up
• It’s not possible to apply default settings to all networked sites using the Network profile
• There is no batch functionality to add lots of domain names in a single go — although a message to their support will help you quickly as they can insert the domains from their end
• A QuantCast Network doesn’t have an overall rank, so you don’t know how all of your sites rank among the 20 million sites they are tracking — you only get rankings for individual sites
• The rankings are based on the U.S. traffic your site(s) get. A global ranking is not (yet) available.

The support staff at QuantCast is very quick to reply to your questions and they are very helpful. When I mentioned the little drawbacks, they filed a ticket with their developers and my ideas might be implemented in the near future.

QuantCast is a useful service to add to your arsenal of webmaster tools. It tells you how your sites compare to other sites around the world and tells you about the demographics of your users.

It’s worth checking out!