uSamp Blog

by Matt Dusig, Co-Founder/CEO

uSamp is a little over three years old. To date, we’ve seen over 6.5 million people globally register and double opt-in for our research panel websites. We register about 10,000 new panelists every day, adding over 300,000 panelists to our database each month. Sounds cool, right? But does the size of the panel at 6.5 million really matter?

Most sample companies market themselves according to panel size, quality of respondent data, variety of the traffic sources and customer service excellence. I am guilty about marketing the size of our panel. We announce the size of our panels to show scale, and to impress clients. Do you blame us?

We can slice and dice our panel in an unlimited number of ways because of the hundreds of data points we have on each panelist.  Data mining is a core function of our sample delivery staff. Our business development team does an amazing job at buying traffic online and getting people around the world interested in registering for our panels. And, our panel operations team does a great job creating reward opportunities that excite panelists, and providing customer service to keep people engaged. It’s how the industry has defined success over the past decade; however I want to offer up another metric for your consideration: traffic.

I think the new discussion shouldn’t only be about panel size, but about traffic. As sample companies move beyond the pure process of building panels, daily/monthly web traffic becomes a core metric.

When we started uSamp, we identified three things — our 3 T’s — to differentiate us from our competitors: Technology, Transparency and Traffic. Traffic is a foreign term to most people in the market research industry. Traffic = website visitors. What good is a website or any online business without visitors? But what good are visitors without the right technology to manage the entire process? From registration to rewards, from deep profiling to quality measures, from routing technology to creating a positive experience—all require excellent technology. And if we don’t honestly and transparently convey the entire process to our clients, then we’re doing our clients and ourselves a disservice.

So how do we measure traffic? Why is traffic important?

Let’s say you want to recruit people from Facebook to take a survey. You don’t really care about the fact that Facebook has a database of 750 million people. You care about how many people will be exposed to your ad during the days your survey is in field. It’s all about visitors and traffic.

When you want a sample company to find panelists for an upcoming survey it doesn’t matter how big the panel is; it matters how people will respond to survey invitations and how much traffic will visit a sample company’s sites during the days you’re in field.

I think the real hard-hitting questions to ask sample companies are as follows (and in an effort to provide full transparency, I’ve answered the questions on behalf of uSamp):

1)    Traffic:

a. How much traffic do your websites see DAILY?  uSamp: Panel is 160,000 daily visitors. River is 40,000 daily visitors.

b. What % of traffic is US vs. International? uSamp: Panel is 53% US, 47% is International.

c. Of the daily visitors, what % are new visitors vs. returning visitors? uSamp: Panel is 40% new. River is 45% new.

2)    Completion and Experience:

a. What % of your daily visitors who log into your site successfully complete a survey on that day? uSamp: Anywhere from 15-30%.

b. What % of people who click from an email invitation successfully complete the survey they were invited to? uSamp: Anywhere from 15-30%.

c. How long is the routing process for a panelist (the process of bouncing a person from question to question before they get routed into the appropriate survey). uSamp: 4-8 questions.

3)    Activity and Quality:

a. How do you define an active panelist? uSamp: Someone who has started a survey or logged into a panel site within last 6 months.

b. What do they have to do to stay active? uSamp: Must show some activity within 6 months.

c. If someone isn’t joining your panel, how do you monitor activity to maintain quality? uSamp:  Multi-layered approach. Vetting recruitment sources, assessing overall quality and potential variability. We also employ geo-IP fencing, IP address verification, proxy server detection, postal address verification, CAPTCHA, our proprietary digital fingerprinting solution, PanelShield and industry-wide accepted tools such as Imperium’s RelevantID.

And, to further push the boundaries of transparency, here’s a screen shot from Google Analytics of just one of uSamp’s popular panel sites which shows web traffic stats for a 30 day period.  2,700,000 visits and 29,700,000 pages views in only 30 days.

All this talk about traffic is not to underestimate the importance of size. But I want to recognize that there are more dimensions to a panel than size. Next time a client asks about panel size, I’ll encourage them to examine our technology, transparency and traffic. Clients should be very concerned if sample vendors aren’t willing to share their traffic sources and all panel attributes. They have a right to know what they are purchasing.

Our greatest asset is owning supply—both panel and traffic. If you don’t own supply than you don’t have an asset to sell. uSamp wants to raise the bar. We are willing to be the most transparent sample company in the industry and encourage other sample suppliers to follow suit.