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, ethnicity, children in the household, frequency of visitation, 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.

Content Segments

These are categories you can set up in Quantcast Measure tags which identify high-quality, high-value audience activity for prospective marketers. Note: Only available via Q for Publishers.

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, ethnicity, 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.

Flash-Based Media

Flash-based media include videos, games, widgets, and other digital media content delivered as an Adobe Flash object. Just as publishers can get their sites and other media assets Quantified for accurate measurement by embedding a JavaScript tag, authors of Flash media can get accurate measurements of their viewership by embedding an ActionScript tag.

IAB Standard Reporting

See related article.

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. For example, approximately 5% of Internet users in the US are Asian. A site with an Asian index of 400 would have an audience four times richer than average in Asians, but Asians would still only constitute one visitor in five.

Installs 

The number of uniques that have launched a mobile app for the first time.

Labels 

See Content Segments.

Lifestyle 

This information shows other sites the audience is likely to visit, and the affinity indicates how much more likely than average. See Reading Our Reports.

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 App SDK

Quantcast’s software development kit that allows publishers to integrate Quantcast Measure into their mobile app. When a visitor launches a publisher’s mobile app, events specified by the publisher are sent to Quantcast servers. Quantcast does not collect any directly identifiable information. Geographic information is limited to a city radius only if enabled by the Publisher. The SDK has a negligible impact on the device’s battery life and uses minimal data bandwidth.

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.

Pageviews 

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.

People 

Quantcast provides audience data for both unique cookie counts and people. The Quantcast statistical direct measurement model takes into account numerous factors to build a translation of cookies to people that is unique to each online digital media property.

Popular/Other Subdomains

This list highlights other subdomains of a specific site that attract the most visitors. Each figure is expressed as a percentage of the total number of visitors to a site or other digital media asset.

Publisher’s Corner

A summary section on each Quantcast profile dedicated to the site or specific media asset’s publisher. Associated with this is a full page where the publisher of a featured web property can describe their site, audience, and future plans.

Quantified Publisher

A site or other digital media asset that has employed site-side tagging using a Quantcast tag or has embedded the Quantcast mobile app measurement SDK in their mobile app property. 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.

Reach

A measure of the number of people visiting a site or other digital media asset over a specific time period. Unless stated otherwise, Quantcast reports average reach figures for Quantified Publishers on a rolling 30-day month.

Session

A period of Internet or mobile app 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. For mobile apps: A session is defined as a visitor launching the application from start or from a background state that has been idle for more than 30 minutes.

Similar Audience

This list displays the other Internet destinations that visitors to a particular site have a strong affinity for. The affinity score shows the strength of the affinity relative to the whole US internet population. Affinities are purely statistical correlations and say nothing about why sites’ audiences might be similar. The sites might have similar content, or one might drive traffic to the other, or there might be another reason for the overlap. See Reading Our Reports.

Syndicators 

The list of syndicators in a network profile shows external sites from which people viewed the publisher’s content. For example, for a publisher of Quantified Flash videos, the syndication will show sites embedding the videos. Google is a common syndicator of HTML content via its cached results pages.

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. Quantcast defines mobile app uniques as the number of distinct app instances (installs) using the app over a given time.

Upgrades

The number of uniques that have launched an upgraded version of an app for the first time.

Visit

See Session.