Glossary of Terms for Measure

Audience Composition

The relative proportion of a site’s audience according to certain demographic attributes including age, gender, income, education, children in the household, etc. Quantcast reports on these and other audience characteristics for all US-based digital media assets through Quantcast Measure.

Audience Keywords

This list shows search terms a site’s audience tends to type in. These are often but not always the keywords that brought people to the site. The frequency metric reported with each term represents how often members of this audience use a specific keyword compared to an average Internet user.

Cookies 

Small files that websites save on the computer of a visitor. A cookie indicates how often a user visits pages and other activity for an individual site.

Demographic 

Attributes and associated values that characterize a group of individuals. Demographic attributes include gender, age, income and educational attainment. Quantcast displays demographics in two ways: as pie charts representing absolute percentages and as bar charts representing audience composition relative to the US Internet average. See Reading Our Reports.

Direct Measurement

While traditional panel-based measurement methodologies extrapolate, this approach couples machine learning with massive quantities of data to measure detailed audience data in real time.

Impression 

A measured publisher event. An impression can include full-page views, ad impressions, widget impressions, and flash videos.

Index 

A measure of how a given metric compares to an average, such as the average US Internet user. If a site indexes 100 in college graduates, that means a given visitor to it is as likely to be a college graduate as any US internet user chosen at random. An index of 200 means the visitor is twice as likely to be a college graduate, 50 means half as likely, and so on. The higher the index, the better the site is at attracting that type of audience. Note that a high index does not necessarily mean a high percentage in an absolute sense.

Measurement Pixels

Snippets of JavaScript code that digital media publishers can embed in their web pages and other content. When a visitor to a Quantified publisher’s site downloads a page, the JavaScript requests an invisible 1×1 pixel image file from Quantcast’s servers. Quantcast does not collect any directly identifiable information and the performance impact on the web page is negligible.

Mobile Web Traffic

This information includes mobile web traffic originating from any handheld or tablet device in a mobile web browser. It does not include traffic from mobile apps.

Page views 

An instance of a page being loaded by a browser.

Pageviews per person

The total number of times an individual loads a page in any number of browsers.

Page Visits

The total number of times a single web browser views a page.

Quantified Publisher

A site or other digital media asset that has employed site-side tagging using a Quantcast tag. These tags allow us to monitor and report audience activity directly rather than providing just rough estimates when designated as a non-Quantified online publisher.

Session

A period of Internet browsing. For online and mobile web properties: During a session, a visitor may encounter many web pages on any given site. Quantcast records a session for a particular site if a visitor accesses one or more pages on a given site within a period. If a user is idle for more than 30 minutes, a new session is created upon further activity.

Tags

Customize your measurement by adding tags. A tag is a custom rollup that allows you to assign tags, or categories to a given page, widget, or any other media asset you own. Once you have tagged your content, they will show up on the network profile view. Tags also support hierarchies, so you can create any custom rollups as needed.

Uniques

A standard measure of audience size is available from analysis tools, including Quantcast. Although many tools label them “visitors,” online uniques technically count the distinct cookies received from or sent to visitors.

Visit

See Session.