According to ClickZ, a new tool for both website owners and advertisers wants to shake up the way online marketing works and the way in which website statistics are presented.  Quantcast, the company behind the new tool, hopes that its free service will help small and medium sized site owners and media buyers find each other more easily.

Quantcast is taking a different approach to site rankings than traditional services.  For one, it's free.  And since the service is targeted at smaller players on the internet, that price tag is likely to help.  In addition to the lack of a price tag, Quantcast is trying to rank and "quantify" more websites than the majority of other ranking services.  As of this writing, Quantcast has collected ranking data on over 20 million websites.  Ranking services usually only focus on the sites at the top of internet charts.

Quantcast wants to be able to change that.

The service collects the standard data that you'd expect:  visits, demographics, etc.  But it also drills down into sub-directories and displays information for each.  A section called "Common Audience" provides a list of other websites that visitors sharing demographic information with those in question are also likely to frequent.  The idea is to allow advertisers to 1) target specific sub-domains and 2) group related sites for a broad but targeted approach to media buys.  Another unique feature, called Siteographics, displays another list of sites divided into categories with related indexes that illustrate how likely a visitor to the site in question is to visit those other sites.  Konrad Feldman, Quantcast CEO, told ClickZ that Siteographics offer "a useful way of getting a quick take on the character of a site's readers."  Indeed.

A quick look around the site shows it to be very simply designed and very easy to use.  In fact, the most prominent feature on the site is the search box at the top of every page that just begs for your attention.  Simply type a URL into the box and Quantcast returns a report on the site.  For example, I entered Amazon.com and was presented with a fairly detailed report on the site's visitors.  A graph on the left side of the report showed the site's daily unique U.S. visitors going back to May.  Demographics and Common Audience information complete the initial view of the report.  Scrolling down the page a bit will display the sub-domain report with links to each sub-domain's own statistics page.

A "Compare" button next to the visitors graph caught my eye so I clicked it and was taken to a page that gave me the option of entering other domains.  With a quick click of the mouse I was able to compare the traffic between Amazon.com, Borders.com, and Barnesandnoble.com using a chart with each domain's traffic stats overlaid.  A checkbox labeled "Relative" allows you to redisplay the graph to show growth or loss of traffic for each site relative to the others.  According to my graphs, while Amazon.com has far more traffic than either of the other online bookstores I compared it to, Borders.com is the clear growth leader of the pack.

Using the Common Audience tool, I went to view PriceGrabber.com's report, as it was the first site on Amazon's list.  PriceGrabber's report had Siteographic information so I gave it a look.  According to Siteographics, the top sites that visitors to PriceGrabber.com are also likely to visit are Tweeter.com and PCWorld.com.  Interesting.

Overall, the tool is very easy to use.  I was able to start collecting valuable data on bookstores within a matter of minutes.  It's simple design, quick response, and straight-forward approach to displaying the collected data were big pluses.

I think this is definitely a service to keep an eye on.  I'm willing to bet we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the future.