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 the Quantcast Platform. 

Live Tag

Within the Quantcast Live Tag, you can see pixel activity, create events, and QA tagging. It also shows impressions against event groups.

Site Tag Activity

Site Tag Activity shows user activity that the Live Tag 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.

Audience Insights

Audience Size

Audience Size will show up within Audience Insights 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 Insights 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.

Site Audiences

Site Audiences are generated through pixel events created in Event Manager. These are events that have seen at least 200 unique impressions within the past 30 days. The size of a tag audience is calculated based on the total devices measured by Quantcast, the tag, and the event triggered.

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 interested 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 also leverage Quantcast’s first-party data to curate audiences based on the content users view.

Campaigns

The campaigns section of the Quantcast Platform allows you to set up campaigns and ad sets, activate them on audiences you have created, and review insights into 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 conversions and impressions across spend levels up to 500% of the current spend. It lives under the “three dot” icons in any campaign or ad set and is only available for conversion objective campaigns. For the forecast to populate, it needs at least one full day of conversion data since the last “major” model change.

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 Insights. 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.