Quantcast said today it is introducing Quantcast Marketer, a service that provides advertisers with detailed reports on how consumers view and interact with brands online.
The company said the free service should improve the ability for advertisers to handle web-based media planning and buying. Forty top marketers have been testing the service privately. It allows marketers to tag and directly measure all of the web-based media they control.
That includes ad campaign impressions, search activity, brand web site content, and specific purchase or upgrade conversions. Standard web analytics firms offer raw impressions and conversion counts, but Quantcast Marketer delivers a profile of the audience, including its interests and demographic data. It includes everyone in the so-called marketing funnel, which includes those who receive and pass on an ad message. And the company claims it can help uncover new audiences for a service or product.
On its face, it sounds similar to Meteor Solutions, which helps companies launch viral campaigns and track them. In the past six months, the Quantcast service has been tested by Lenovo, Scottrade, Kia, Virgin America, Razorfish, Neo@Ogilvy and others.
"They made the challenging task of understanding discreet consumer segments much easier," said R.J. Hilgers, SVP, Managing Director at Razorfish, a digital marketing agency and one of the beta testers. The data collected can show that some people in demographic groups will accept an ad pitch and upgrade to a new subscription or services while others don't.
Quantcast already provides its Quantcast Publisher and Quantcast Media Planner services which measure media consumption of media assets across 10 million web sites and help advertisers plan their media buys. It uses that tool to provide visibility into the media habits of 200 million Internet users in the United States.