By Lex Davidson

Fresh off the heels of the Google Trends launch, Quantcast, one of the leaders in traffic analytics, today announced that they are adding a Cookie Corrected Audience Data component to their tracking interface.  For those of you who are not familiar with Quantcast, they made a name for themselves by being the first company to supply a snippet of code to third party websites to track visitors.  Many industry insiders migrated from the outdated 100% panel approach of Alexa to Quantcast in the recent years.  Other industry participants are Compete and ComScore Media Metrix.

Previous to today, Quantcast only tracked website usage based off of the code you placed in your site along with some form of panel polling. Below is what Quantcast says about their new service:

“Quantcast’s audience measurement service helps all industry participants address the complexities of today’s changing media market. Unlike panel measurement services which report a standardized traffic metric for all sites by extrapolating from their sample, Quantcast directly measures traffic for quantified publishers and provides panel-based estimates for the rest of the web (non-quantified publishers).”

With Google Trends having such a wide reach due to their Google Analytics service, Quantcast needed to do something like this in order to have some form of differentiation in this highly competitive market.  Will this additional tracking mechanism be enough?  I truly do not believe so.  I’ve liked Quantcast since they launched, however Google’s reach and technology is simply too far and too advanced for Quantcast.  But please, prove me wrong Quantcast, nothing would make me more happy.

For more details on this new technology, click here to access their white paper: Quantcast Cookie Correction White Paper