Google has started to open up their demographic tracking system to advertisers with Google Ad Planner and Google Trends users, but here is a look at two other established ways to find demographic info on almost any website.
There are two well-known publicly available free tools showing users’ demographics for any website: Quantcast and MSN adCenter Labs. While neither of them can be considered 100% accurate, they provide some interesting data worth looking into.
1. Quantcast will show you the site traffic graph and its users’ detailed demographics info:
- visitors’ gender distribution;
- age;
- household income;
- ethnicity;
- education.
Plus, for its partner sites Quantcast will also reveal a site’s geographic distribution.
2. MSN adCenter Labs tool shows general age distribution (based on one-month MSN search log) and predicted age distribution (based on the adLabs predictive model). It will give you an idea if the site is male- or female-oriented and which age group of users it is preferred by.
Now let’s try and compare the demographics of two social media giants most webmasters are interested in: Digg and StumbleUpon.
According to Quantcast, Digg’s audience is much younger, with the most active group of people aged between 18 and 34 years (36%) followed by visitors of 35-49 (33%). Most (34%) StumbleUpon users fall into 50+ age group (surprisingly) followed by people aged between 35 and 49 years (32%):
MSN labs show similar data. While the two sites audience looks completely the same based on the general distribution graph, predicted distribution also considers StumbleUpon users considerably older than Digg’s ones. Thus, according to MSN, Digg’s audience is “18~24 Oriented ” while StumbleUpon users are “35~49 Oriented”:
Note: MSN demographics prediction tool shows a bit different data for http://digg.com and http://www.digg.com and I am not sure how this can be explained.
Anyway, despite some differences, it is interesting to note that both the tools agree on one thing: StumbleUpon users are older than Digg’s so it is wise to remember that when crafting your social media promotion campaign.
