I co-own an internet-based T-shirt business, and we often look for publicity and sometimes advertising on other Web sites. Female bloggers have been wonderful to us, so we continue to contact them, suggesting that they do a review of our products or even a Planet Mom giveaway. In turn, we get a lot of requests from women-oriented sites, asking for us to do a giveaway with them or trying to sell us on advertising. It’s important to know which site will give us the biggest bang for our buck.

First, we check out the site to review the style and look of it. If we like what we see, we do some more digging. A vital tool for us is Quantcast.com. On this site, you enter a web address and it tells you how many monthly visitors it gets and the demographics. At Planet Mom, we target women of child-bearing age.

Quantcast also helps us with our own site. I can find out the gender, age, income, and family size, among other things, of visitors to PlanetMomTShirts.com. Knowing the age of our visitors is very important because it helps us when we’re thinking of new phrases for our shirts. For example, if we don’t have a lot of women over the age of 50 looking at our site, we’re not going to offer a shirt for grandmothers. I can also tell how many of our visitors are “regulars” and how many are just “passers-by.”

When we see that we have a lot of “regulars”, it inspires us to change the look and copy on our site to keep it fresh.

Quantcast can offer a lot of information but they don’t have information on every web site. In order to get direct measurements about a Web site, the site must be registered with Quantcast– free of charge– and the site must be tagged. Rough audience estimates are given about sites that are not registered with them.