• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 8, 2010

Publishers that don't know 67% of their Web site visitors prefer cooking at home rather than eating in restaurants or listening to classical instead of pop music might want to try a free downloadable tool from Visual DNA.

Audience Analytics, released Thursday, allows publishers and Web site owners to create an approximately two-minute age-based quiz they can upload to their site. Ads provided by Visual DNA prompt site visitors to take the personality quiz. There are nine questions to most quizzes.

But questions aren't the ordinary run of the mill. Alex Willcock, founder and chief executive officer, says understanding people by opening a core channel to communicate stems from finding another way to express his love for classical music and the arts. "Very direct questions so often found in nightmare surveys are restricted and blunt," he says. "I found that asking abstract questions often become more telling."

The questions create a visual story of the site visitor's life. They range from "What sparks a conversation with you?" to "What will you treat yourself to next?" to "What's your goal for the year?"

The visitor submits the answered questions, and Audience Analytics' technology puts them in one or several categories, and drops a cookie in the visitor's browser. Those who complete the quiz get a self-profile in return.

The Web site owner logs in to a reporting section to gather data about visitors. Aside from the free offering launched today, Visual DNA has a paid subscription that provides customized quizzes. For example, the U.K.-based company has been supporting Match.com in the United Kingdom, and the Los Angeles Times in the United States with a custom quiz and backend analytics.

Abandon rates for the quizzes are minimal, Willcock says. People complete about 75% of the quizzes they start.

Think of Audience Analytics as Google Analytics for understating consumers. The normal metrics from comScore and Hitwise are based on panel -- so it is data extrapolated from consumers using the Web rather than providing data from people visiting a specific site.

While the free product provides aggregated information on the types of visitors who come to the site, a subscription model provides an API to yield information that allows the site owner to retarget ads. The price for the subscription offering relies on a cost-per-=thousand (CPM) model and can tie into other types of campaigns on the back end, such as email.

Visual DNA only works with non-personally identifiable information. "If a publisher wants to work with us to tie Audience Analytics into a retargeting or email campaign, we will only work with non-personally identifiable information if the consumer has agreed," he says.