How do you find what type of traffic is going to a specific site? Who are visiting and what oter sites are they visiting? What is their age range and household income? These are good questions when trying to target a specific website. If you advertise via banner exchanges, GCN, PPV, banner placements, etc then you want to know what type of traffic is going to specific sites.

This gives you a high advantage over others who just want to advertise. It gives you the leverage to see what type of traffic is going to their site and see if they will convert or not base on the demographics. The question is how do you find such information? There is a bunch of sites out there and today I will compare Google’s Revamped Ad Planner and Quantcast.

Check a video overview below:

What is Google Ad Planner?

When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

via Google Adwords Blog Post

What is Quantcast?

Quantcast is a new breed of audience service, focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions. Quantcast provides publishers, marketers and agencies unmatched capabilities to measure, organize, discover and transact based on directly-measured traffic and inferred audience data.

via Quantcast

Both of these tools are very beneficial and packs a lot of features, both are free to use and provide a lot of data. The big difference with both is Google Ad Planner has a bunch of preloaded sites, which you can filter through via type of site, volume, and other demographics. Quantcast, does not have this, unless its via their paid service.

The best thing about this is if you advertise on GCN you get a ton of sites, you can use and import those sites and filter which one will benefit you most. I have imported a ton of sites and have checked the sites and see which one will bring more results. This can help you filter out which sites are getting the volume, what kind of ads are displayed on their sites, etc.

Let’s take a look at my blog and compare:

• Check Me on Google Ad Planner
• Check Me on Quantcast

As you can see the results are different in numbers, but very similar in data. They are very close to each other I can safely assume specific types of data about my site just by overlooking both these sites and the data it is providing. With this type of information about a site you can make smart decisions on certain aspects of your market research.

There are a lot of ways to find demographics of a site, but I think these are the 2 most powerful. MSN adlabs is another good one to add to this collection. But Ad Planner comes pretty heavy with the tools and the research.

I would always compare both Ad Planner with Quantcast to see how closely the demographics are and make sure I can make a smart decisions base on the information given to me.