I just learned about Quantcast and their web viewer profiles. It’s like Google Trends for Analytics. Great fun if you’re as curious as I am about associations and how they tick and the web.
Apparently the site reports are available for any site that tracks users with Quantcast, and of high interest to me is that some associations use Quantcast, so I can look up association web stats if I know their site URL and they’re using Quantcast.
Naturally I started with looking up the Society for Technical Communication, STC. There is a disclaimer that “We have sparse data for this site, so estimates are rough.” But come to find out, “The site is popular among a rather female, more educated audience.” If you look at Demographics the visitors are apparently also middle-aged and tend not to have children. Or at least, the members who visit the site resemble those characteristics.
Contrast those demographics with the American Library Association, the ALA. They’re a huge user of iMIS, the association management product I document at work at Advanced Solutions International. There’s a great blog post titled “What is iMIS?” written by my favorite “Shifted Llibrarian” blogger, Jenny Levine, that describes their large number of membership options and therefore pricing complexity “because ALA offers 30+ types of membership and there are multiple divisions and round tables, we have more than 900 pricing rules in iMIS.” Wow.
According to Quantcast, the ALA membership tends to have young children ages 3-11 and they are affluent.
The ALA recently reported about their web site management methods in a case study about integrating Drupal with the iMIS membership data titled Integrating Drupal and iMIS: ALAconnect Case Study. Really interesting reading.
Quantcast has an audience site search that enables marketers to enter demographics and get a list of websites whose readership matches the audience the want to target. I just like to web-spy on people, I guess.