I’m ready to really start sending out advertising inquires to website owners for my Media Buy. I have a list of 30 websites that I would LOVE to advertise on. Some of them are obviously going to be quite expensive. But to help me narrow down my potentials I need to know more about the traffic that they are receiving.

For this I use 4 websites. Quantcast.com, Compete.com, Alexa.com, and Google.com. I’m sure there’s better ways to do this but you have to find what works for you.

Compete and Alexa I use to find the traffic volume. Now, I like to compare websites against a site whose traffic source and volume I am sure of. In other words, I compare traffic against one of my own sites. Compete is pretty cool because it give you an estimation of actual traffic volume. Alexa gives you a percentage of the daily reach of Internet users.

Now Quantcast can also be used to find traffic volume. However, Quantcast gives a very very rough estimate of traffic volume. Because they are so new a lot of their information is incomplete. So I try to not rely 100% on Quantcasts traffic estimations. Instead I like to use Quantcast for demographic research. It’s important to know who visits a website. We need to make sure we can find offers that match the demographic. Just remember… Quantcast is a very rough estimate of traffic volume.

Google I use to find how sites rank for certain keywords. If I was going to advertise on a health related site I would be more happy to advertise on a site that ranked on the 1st or 2nd page for weight loss as opposed to a site that ranks on the 99th page for the same keyword.

So now you know one way to look for traffic stats. It’s important to be able to properly gage traffic so that you don’t advertise on a site that has no traffic at all.