Best Practices: Audience Forecasting and Audience Sizes

Audience Forecasting and Audience Sizes are generated throughout the platform. This article is designed to give you a better understanding of the methodology Quantcast uses to generate these sizes, and where to find the forecasting tools within Quantcast Platform. 

Q Pixel

Within Q Pixel, you can see pixel activity, create events, and QA tagging. It also shows impressions against event groups.

Pixel Activity

Pixel Activity shows user activity that Q Pixel sees on all tagged web pages. Pixel activity will be unique across all accounts based specifically on the p-code being used within the pixel. For Pixel activity to populate, our pixel would need to see a minimum of 1 impression across the past seven days.

Pixel Events

Pixel Events are events created by you, whether rule-based or data pass-back and live under pixel activity. Pixel events show you the status and total impressions associated to the defined event. For the event to be considered “active” the event needs to track at least one impression within the past seven days. These events fire based on when users go on a tagged webpage/URL and the conditions of the event are met. For example, if a user goes to quantcast.com three times and we have an event tracking it, it will be counted as three impressions.

Planner

The Quantcast Platform allows you to view insights and create advertising campaigns based on predefined audiences. You can build audiences off of the general internet population, pixels placed on your website, or offline data you’ve uploaded to Quantcast. These audiences can be updated and customized with a variety of filters, such as demographics, location, devices, and interests.

Audience Size

Audience Size will show up within Audience Planner based on the filters and events you have selected. The audience size will change instantaneously as more events/filters are added or removed within the audience. Audience Size is calculated by using the total devices measured by Quantcast filtered by the characteristics selected on the left-hand side. Quantcast uses implemented pixels placed on consenting publisher websites to gather data and build strong first-party data that help determine audience sizes within the Quantcast Universe.

Forecasting Tool

The Forecasting Tool lives within Audience Planner next to Audience Size. The forecasting tool provides you a forecast of monthly uniques, impressions, and audience reach depending on the monthly budget implemented. Note that these estimates are based on all live Quantcast campaigns in the United States over a recent 30-day  period regardless of the campaign goals and assuming a viewability of 55%. These estimates are NOT guaranteed. To use the forecasting tool, your audience size must be at least 200,000 in size.

Pixel Audiences

Pixel Audiences are generated through pixel events created in Q Pixel. These are events that have seen at least 200 unique impressions within the past 30 days. The audience size of a pixel audience is calculated using the total devices measured by Quantcast, using the pixel, and triggering the event created.

Content Interests

Content Interests are 150+ predefined categories curated by Quantcast related to online content consumption across the 100+ million web destinations measured by Quantcast. It leverages contextual data to build audiences of users who have interest in the specified category.

If the predefined categories don’t meet your needs, you can use Keywords to define an audience on the fly by using custom words and phrases related to online English-language content consumption across the 100 million+ web destinations measured by Quantcast. Using the same technology underpinning Content Interests, Keywords likewise leverage Quantcast’s first-party data to curate audiences based on content viewed by users.

Campaigns

The campaigns section of Quantcast Platform allows you to set up campaigns and ad sets, activate on audiences that you have created, and review insights on campaign performance. It also offers the opportunity to see ad set estimates and budget forecasts.

Budget Forecast

Budget Forecast is a mid-campaign forecasting tool that shows estimated daily conversion and impressions at various spend levels up to 500% of current spent. It lives under the “three dot” icons on any campaign or ad set and is only available to use for conversion objective campaigns. In order for the forecast to populate, it needs at least one full day of conversion data since the last “major” model change occurred.

Ad Set Estimates

Ad Set Estimates are curated at the ad set level of the platform. As you adjust your model and budget within the ad set, these estimates will change. However, we consider Demographics to be an optimization, not a filter, so it will not impact the ad estimates. Potential Reach is calculated based on the daily number of devices available for targeting, averaged over the last 7 days. Potential reach will be different than the audience size seen in Audience Planner. This is mainly due to targeting tactics and layers in place set at the ad set level that will impact the ad set estimate’s potential reach.