Quantcast is one of the Web’s best sources for tracking, not only web site traffic, but also who those visitors are.  For example, check out this Quantcast audience profile for Lunarpages.  You can see that in the US, 54% of the visitors are men, and 46% are female.  Details like this can really help you target your content to the audience that is viewing it – or perhaps target your data to reach those who are not checking out your site, for one reason or another.

Now the information your can gather without signing up for Quantcast is limited.  Where you can get a real advantage is signing up, pasting the embed code on your own sites, and then start really learning about who is visiting your web site.

Create an Account – You must sign up for a free account at Quantcast to be able to gather even more information about your web site traffic and users.  Click the “Create Account” link at the top of the web page to get started with the process.

Add Your Web Site – Now, you will want to get started with the “quantification” process.  Click the “Add a Site” button to grab the tracking code you will need.

Copy/Paste Code – Next, you will want to copy the tracking code from the Quantcast web site, and embed it into all of your web pages.  It you are using something like WordPress, Joomla or some other content management system – you can often copy and paste this code into the “footer” of your web site’s web design template files.

Scan the Site – Now you want to put in the domain name (www.yourdomainname.com) into the site scanner, so that Quantcast can scan for the code you embedded in all of your web pages.

Your last step in this process is to wait.  It will take a few days before you are able to gather enough information for your traffic to become useful to you.

Here are a few more things to remember:

• Traffic data will appear in 4-6 days. Until then your profile will be marked as “Quantification in Progress.”
• Demographic data takes around 10 days to populate. Note that Quantcast generally cannot provide demographic data on websites with less than 1,000 US visitors per month.
• Business and Geographic data will populate after 30 days of being Quantified.

Now you will be able to find even more data out about the people who visit your web site.  This provides you with one more way to quickly measure what people are doing on your web site, who they are and how many visitors are there too.  Quantcast is currently used by 9 of the top 10 media agencies, more than half of the top publishers (by ad revenue), and marketers from every major vertical use them to define, buy, or sell the audiences that matters to them most.