Recruiting and managing an online research panel is often a challenging and complex endeavor. The respondent lifecycle poses challenges every step of the way. Methodology, management philosophy, sourcing, rewards and technology all play a key role in generating high quality online sample. These fundamentals can be further complicated by the financial investment required to develop large-scale research panels. As clients evaluate panel providers, there are many standards that should be considered to ensure success from both methodological and financial perspectives.

Panels are not bottomless wells, and like anything that lives and breathes, they need to be nurtured and fed. The following blog series will illustrate the life cycle of a panel by addressing recruitment sourcing, registration, profiling, routing, incentives, and respondent engagement. Hopefully, this detailed look will encourage an examination of our industry’s health, and inspire future discussion for improvement.

Ever wonder where online panelists come from? Most sample companies purchase or acquire web traffic from websites that promote online rewards, points and/or sweepstakes. Why? People take surveys to either give an opinion or to obtain some type of reward for giving their opinion. Most panelists originate from the following sources:

Rewards Sites

These are sites that offer rewards for emails coming to your inbox or rewards for performing various tasks online. One of those tasks could be a survey opportunity. Most of the major sampling firms get their traffic from these sources.

Affiliate Networks

There are a few major affiliate networks that work with almost every sample or routing technology firm. They acquire their traffic from many of the reward sites in the prior group, which often requires de-duplication software as panelists come to survey sampling systems from many of the same places. The affiliate networks can’t target panelists so they mostly send raw traffic into panel registration sites or to river and routing solutions.

Loyalty Programs

We’ve all heard about people taking surveys for loyalty points from major airlines and hotel chains. Essentially, in exchange for taking surveys you earn points that you can use for airline miles or hotel chain loyalty program points. These are harder deals for sampling firms to negotiate, but a few firms have cracked the code on this.

TV Advertising

There are companies that run TV spots/commercials promoting surveys. Some use the recruited panelists solely for their own research projects. Others sell your data to other major panel companies’ databases. This process of automatically registering panelists for another panel is called co-registration.

A diverse sourcing methodology typically facilitates greater representation. Conversely, using an inadequate number of sources may introduce bias, resulting in negative behaviors and poor sample quality.

In summary, recruitment sources should be carefully vetted and assessed before these sources are introduced to the existing panel population. The panel team should evaluate the flow and composition of inbound traffic, understanding how each source impacts the demographic, geographic, and even psychographic make-up of the panel. This careful evaluation and ongoing assessment is of paramount importance and helps to protect against significant shifts in the sample frames generated against the panel.

Stay tuned for the next in our series on panel registration and quality.

Lisa Wilding-Brown has over a decade of experience in the market research industry. Wilding-Brown is responsible for panel development & management at uSamp — in particular publisher management/recruiting, member engagement, profiling and rewards. Before joining uSamp in 2009, Lisa served as the Panel Loyalty & Retention Manager at Harris Interactive. Wilding-Brown was instrumental in the development and management of the Harris Poll Online, one of the first online market research panels in the industry and spearheaded the development of over 40 specialty panels, which increased targeting capabilities significantly. Wilding-Brown is a graduate of the State University of New York at Geneseo with a BA in both Communication & International Relations.

Sample providers must thoroughly understand every market in which they work. There is no knowledge substitute for regional knowledge.

Most market researchers can agree that sample quality is the lifeblood of our industry. We can have the fastest and most innovative technology in the world, but if we are not constantly taking precautions to recruit, refresh and restore our panels, our fancy toys mean nothing.

We also love to talk about global scale. But sometimes, in all the excitement, we lose sight of the foundation of these panels: The people.

uSamp has long recognized that sensitivity to sample is the key to preserving our greatest asset. We pride ourselves in being able to source the individuals that make up representative sample frames.  So how do we balance this need to provide a global panel, while recognizing local differences of both our clients and our panelists? Also, how do we standardize our methodologies without sacrificing a customized approach?

For those of us in the United States, it is easy to take a western-centric approach. We often make the mistake of assuming that simply because residents of other countries are online, they respond to the same cultural prompts that keep our domestic panels healthy. But let’s go back to the importance of regional sensitivity that goes beyond language. It starts by giving our clients the tools to communicate with international panelists profiled with respect to their local customs and definitions, and providing our panelists with a localized survey experience and incentive program.

We must make it our duty to stop thinking about global scalability and start understanding the nuances that make regions rich data points. As such, we have built our technology to cater to the uniqueness of our panelists. We now offer our clients self-serve access to purchase respondents in over 90 countries in their native currency using our SampleMarket application. We reward panelists in their own currency as well. It is our way of showing how much we value their individual voices.

In today’s increasingly global society, it is impossible to function in a domestic silo without thinking about a product’s international potential. It is exciting to have the world at your fingertips. We can spread information quickly and easily through email and video chat; however, when we get caught up in the technology, it is easy to lose sight of the people on the other end of that email chain, and think of them as an endless commodity that can easily be replaced. While it is truly a small world after all, we do have cultural differences that have to be respected.

Online sampling is built on profiling. Our work revolves around identifying demographics and differentiating by each data point. Sample providers may boast of international panel, but what does this reach really mean if someone can’t offer clients the opportunity to directly access those panelists whenever, wherever and however they want? And when it comes down to cultivating and rewarding panelists, we often forget to customize. Our panelists are unique individuals who are sharing their opinions for our clients to gain valuable insights that shape the products and services around us. The reasons why they participate and the rewards and experiences that keep them engaged will vary just like their individual preferences. Let’s not forgo sample quality for scale; let’s circle back to our clients and panelists as the center of our global reach.

-with Lauren Sozio, Social Media Manager, uSamp

I recently attended the MRS annual conference in London, and as usual it was an inspiring and thought provoking event. Of the papers or presentations that I was lucky enough to watch, very few were based on self-promotion and instead focused on what we as an industry can do to improve our craft. Topics ranged from gamification to NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), case studies on new or innovative methodologies, and of course, the odd interesting debate.

One thing struck me as distinctly lacking from any topic, and that is a very simple principle that uSamp has held for a long time – survey respondents are also people. People have a life outside of sitting on their computers / iPads / iPhones and taking online surveys. I really feel that the industry is losing sight of this. Maybe because there is no telephone or face-to-face contact with the respondent. Maybe because the appeal of mobile surveying has eclipsed attention to panelist experience (mobile does not mean that respondents are impervious to the invasiveness of answering questions that are poorly formatted to the medium). Maybe because we, as an online panel industry refer to our people as “assets”, “sources”, “panelists”, “traffic.” Whatever the reason, I’m calling on us as an industry to re-focus.

I’ll give a topical example. Jon Puleston of GMI did a great presentation on gamification, and how a gamified survey can have a significant impact on the survey taking experience of the respondent. The key take away from that session at the MRS was that if we can find better ways to interact with our people, they will spend more time considering their responses, they will be more engaged with the survey topic, and therefore the quality of data and insight at the back end will be much richer as a result.

From a panel management perspective, it also means that those people will remain active on the panel for longer, meaning more efficiencies for the panel companies. Personally, I’m all in favor of approaches like this, and at uSamp we are looking into ways that we can also help to engage with our panelists in new and innovative ways, but here’s the problem – I see little evidence of uptake.

Fast forward just two days, and I was commissioned a project, which was the antithesis of most of the MRS conversation topics. People (not just panelists – actual human beings) were being asked to wait five minutes to download four online ads before they could even begin the survey, (most of which dropped out before the download completed), and then of those that did do the download, only 10% of them actually qualified to take the survey. Once the people reached this point, they then had to sit through 20 minutes of very dreary and boring questioning with lots of grids, open end questions and little else.

I admire GMI, and other companies, that are trying to get innovative in the MR industry and develop technologies that help engagement with our respondents. But without buy in from the client side, without MR agencies being prepared to work with us on these initiatives, I’m worried that we will continue to close our eyes and pretend that panelists are just a number, defined by how many survey completes can be generated and not by the quality of the data they are providing.

To all researchers out there that design surveys and commission panel companies, please ask yourselves two questions:

• Would you take that survey yourselves?
• How much money would you want to be paid to do so?

In many cases, the answer would either be “no”, or “a lot more than my total CPI from my panel provider”.

So please, as an industry let’s re-focus, treat respondents as people, and design surveys that they want to take, and adapt them to the appropriate environment (be it mobile or otherwise), with the right incentives to make them want to take their time and answer honestly and accurately.  Otherwise we’re just accepting bad data as commonplace, with more regard for profit margins than quality of insights, and that’s not the industry I saw on show at the MRS conference.

uSamp, a leader in providing targeted audiences for global consumer insights, engaged 650 members from its newly inaugurated Hispanic panel, SúperOpinión.com, to survey participants on their attitudes toward social media compared to the general population. Here are the findings:

In a previous post, Gregg Lavin introduced uSamp’s Hispanic Panel. A large part of getting access to the Hispanic market is tapping into the multiple segments. One can get very granular in segmenting the market by country of origin, but understanding acculturation level is critical. Why? Acculturation has a large impact on behaviors and needs which directly translate into specific purchasing behaviors and brand awareness.

It is important to understand and clearly define the unacculturated Hispanic segment because their consumer needs and behaviors are markedly different than the acculturated segment. Acculturated Hispanics have adopted the culture, and they are more likely to demonstrate consumer behavior, which is similiar to the general market. Conversely, the unacculturated population is comprised of those who have not relinquished the behaviors, attitudes, and traditions of their origin and as such demonstrate different behaviors, which brands certainly need to decipher. Simply put, when brands fail to segment the Hispanic market in this manner, they often fall short in their marketing and product development ventures.

How can market researchers better understand this complex and diverse audience? It is essential to gain expertise in this market, invest in tapping new, unique sources, in order to help clients glean the business insights that have been out of grasp for far too long.

Can Panel Suppliers Learn The Language?

Building an unacculturated Hispanics panel presents challenges that suppliers don’t face in other markets: How do we cultivate an experience unique to them? Cultural immersion is very difficult to measure, and there are many questions to consider before reaching out to a particular audience. Do we speak to the unacculturated Hispanics as Latinos in English, or in the language they’re comfortable speaking?

We started by studying the Hispanic consumption of media. The key is to find out where they are and speak to them in the language they understand in both traditional and new media channels. Hispanics’ presence on social media platforms is extraordinarily powerful, as these channels present a level of comfort — a trusted community where individuals can communicate in their mother tongue. A recent study revealed that Hispanics are more active on social media channels than other ethnicities, 27% of Internet users spending six or more hours engaging on these platforms.

Perhaps Jose Cancela, principal of Hispanic USA, said it best when he noted, “We [Hispanic audiences] want to be courted in the language we make love in, for most of us, that would be in Spanish.”

Nike, Macy’s, Ikea and H&M are just a few of many multinational brands that offer their products in Spanish in order to reach unacculturated Hispanics, as they have realized the importance of breaking down the language barrier. So what was our takeaway from all of this?

When developing our private-label panel, SúperOpinión, we wanted to give our members the option to fully customize their account – language preference, email invitation frequency, etc. Additionally, they can begin the registration process from their mobile devices and access hundreds of customizable rewards: from online gift cards to airline miles. By building and managing our own proprietary rewards engine, we strive to bring panelists an unparalleled user-experience and retain them for the long-haul. We realized that no two panelists are alike, and we wanted to build an environment that accommodated their diverse needs. This is only the beginning of our efforts to engage and build these audiences, and hope that we keep reinforcing our central mission: panelists are people.

When Google launches something new, it’s always a big deal-no matter how big or small. Within a matter of minutes, blogs are abuzz with speculation (“What is Google Up To?“). Spectators are overrun with whirlwind of emotions: excitement, fear, resentment, and praise for the powerhouse. Its latest innovation (or disruption-depending on which way you read it), Consumer Surveys, is not a surprising move for the company that holds the key to what Leonard Murphy identifies as the “ ‘Big Data’ aspect.” No doubt, Google has made its way into nearly every aspect of Internet life, and this move into the market research industry brings good visibility to on-demand SaaS insights. But if they want to be a true player in this space, there are a few key considerations to keep in mind.

• Google’s primary focus is to monetize premium content for publishers. In this vein, the solution is more polling than full surveying capabilities.
• Pricing is somewhat elusive. For demo targeting, it’s $.50 per response. But they don’t clearly tell you that a response is a single question. A 20 question survey with a screener or demo targeting will be a $10 CPI.
• Analysis of the relationship between survey questions is difficult and sometimes not even possible because of the question number limitation. Each person only answers 1 of the 20, and Google aggregates the data, which makes deep analysis harder.
• Targeting is limited to just age, gender and census region.
• Timeliness constraints such as completing the survey in a timely manner, publisher inventory at the time and competition with other surveys.

Their solution lacks many features that brands, insight directors and market research professionals would need and expect. But as we know, Google usually launches skeleton applications and builds upon them based on client feedback. And there are two elephants in the room  – one which plays to their advantage: mobile (Android and the world of apps); and one which is potentially a bumpy road: data mining and privacy concerns.

Daniel Ross, SVP of Product and Technology at uSamp decided to take Google’s Consumer Survey insights program for a test drive. The following deconstructs the insights program from survey set-up to pricing to analysis. Ross researches a general population of individuals in the US that have gone on a cruise at least once in the past year. The sample size for this study is N=200.

Survey Set-up

Users have the option to:

• Tag surveys with keywords, so they can be referenced later in the “Surveys” section
• Access a small set of pre-canned basic survey templates
• Copy from an existing survey

Audience Selection and Screening

Targeting options are pretty broad, which proves useful when looking for a general population audience. Users have the ability to survey the US represented population, specify gender, age, or geography (by 1 of 4 regions) based on inferred data or can decide to use a screener question.

Figure 1

Given the niche audience (“cruise goers”), it seemed appropriate to use the “custom audience using a screening question” (see Figure 1). At first glance, it appears that users have the ability to screen people.

To test this observation, the following question was posed:

“Which of the following activities have you done in the past 12 months?” Should users not select “Cruise Vacation,” they would be terminated  from the survey.

However, Google doesn’t present the option to list of several activities, and instead survey creators must rephrase their question to accomodate a “Yes/No” answer selection. In this case, the question was revised to:

“Have you ever been on a cruise vacation?”

Based on this test alone, the “custom audience” selection is a bit misleading as one can’t really target custom audiences through detailed user profiles. Rather it’s a way to target by asking the general population and then weeding through to find the needle in a haystack.

Pricing

Google offers 3 different pricing selects.

Pricing is variable based on the number of questions and targeting options. For example, a 3 question survey with a screening question will cost $1.50 per response.

• General population: $0.10 per response (per question) with a $100 cost minimum.
• Inferred demographic targeting*(gender, age, geo region): $0.50 per response (per question)
• *Inferred demographic targeting is NOT self-reported data by the survey taker. This is inferred based on the user’s IP address and cookie data
• Custom audience (Target a specific population like dog owners, moms, or golfers using a screening question (e.g. “Do you own a dog?”): $0.50 per response (per question).

Survey Creation

Once you’ve determined the audience selection, the survey building begins! 3 questions were added on top of the screening question configured during the pricing stage.

• You can build a survey with as many questions as you’d like with single select, multi-select, rating and image options.
• For question types with lists, you are forced to randomize the list if you have more than 5 answer choices.
• There’s no ability to set standard survey workflow logic (e.g. skips or branching). The best way to understand what’s possible is to think of a 1 question poll. Your survey (or poll for that matter) is sent out to users in the form of 1 question-which means that those who complete the “survey” are only going to see 1 of the 3 questions.

Figure 2

Google is presenting only 1 question to users, which means you get a unique set of individuals answering only 1 of the 3 questions. As you can see in Figure 2, there is not an equal number of people that have completed the survey questions because it’s a different group of individuals answering each one.

Analysis and Presentation

This makes for an extremely difficult analysis should you want to do a comparative analysis (cross-tab) between questions. For example, if you want to see how important the price of a cruise is to people relative to how someone purchased their last cruise vacation, the analytics are one-off and only allow you to see how people responded to a single question.

Figure 2 shows survey progress 15 hours after the survey was launched–just about half of where we need to be at 200 responses. 70% of respondents were dropped after the screening question—so it is taking a bit longer to complete. Since it’s still early, Google likely only has their polling widget (which they refer to as “Survey Wall”) on a few key publisher sites.

Google’s strength in all of this is their graphing/analytics solution, which uses Google’s charting APIs, but the previous mention of not being able to compare question answers is a huge drawback. Figure 3 shows the results for 1 question compared with the inferred demo/geographic data (per IP location and cookie data).

Figure 3

In summary, here are key findings from this preliminary trial:

Strengths:

• graphing/analytics solution
• statistical relevance measures
• tagging functionality

Drawbacks:

• custom audience misleading
• screeners ineffective
• inability to compare question answers
• delayed response rate

It is no surprise that Google has come to play in the consumer intelligence space. Whether they can execute a survey platform properly is another challenge that might require the search engine behemoth to take a page from the MR industry.

One of the most fascinating things about working in Market Research is that the audience is continuously changing. One of the traits of a successful market researcher is the ability to nimbly react to these fluctuations.

Over the past decade, there’s been a significant change in the U.S. that is shifting not only the cultural demographics but altering the economic landscape. Since 2000, Hispanics have accounted for 56% of the U.S. population growth. In 2010, the Hispanic market represented 16.3% of the total U.S. population, and counted for 50.5 million. By 2014, one in every four mothers in the U.S. will be Hispanic. In five years, the U.S. Hispanics population is projected to have a purchasing power of $1.8 trillion (2007 Hispanic Market Monitor, Global Insight). Not surprisingly, organizations are keen to capitalize on the growth of this demographic. It remains one of the most challenging populations for Market Researchers to recruit.

Furthermore, the distinction between unacculturated and acculturated Hispanics is just as important as other demographic differentiators such as age, occupation, and location. uSamp has made it our mission to understand this complex and diverse audience.  Several years ago, we recognized that our clients were struggling to reach this population.  We’ve gained expertise in the market, we’ve invested heavily in tapping new, unique sources in order to deliver Hispanic audiences that can help clients glean the business insights that have been out of grasp for far too long. Our Hispanic panels now host more than 100,000 members.

We may have a member base of over 7.5 million panelists, but we understand that each of our members are different—and that diversity is what makes them valuable.

We hope you will stay tuned for our next post by Vivian Acosta, uSamp’s Senior Manager of Multicultural Insights who will elaborate on the unacculturated Hispanic Market.

Here is proof that good things come in fours:

Matt Dusig, Co-founder & CEO

4 Favorite Apps: Facebook, Draw Some, Flipboard, Pandora
4 Numbers you know by heart: My SSN, My Wife’s SSN, My phone number growing up, # of people Taking Surveys RIGHT NOW!
4 Things people don’t know about you: Enjoy cycling & spinning, Graduated with a degree in Fine Art, Have an older sister, xBox gamer.
4 Things you would never leave home without: Cell phone, Wallet, Keys, Clothing.
4 Things you’d put in a time capsule to remember the past 4 years: Notes from board meetings, press releases, versions of our website, some of the hair I’ve lost from starting another company.

Gregg Lavin, Co-founder & President

4 Foods that make you sing: Sushi, Soup, Omelettes, Tacos
4 Things Tech that you couldn’t live without: iPhone, iPad, Yahoo Finance, uSamp
Final 4 predictions: Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio State, Marquette
4 people that have inspired you: Steve Jobs, Jackie Robinson, Page/Brin, and Bono
4 Things you hope to accomplish in the next 4 years: Continue to elevate uSamp to Rockstar Status, Sit on the board of a major Non-Profit organization, Compete in an Iron Man, Give my kids 4 more amazing years of serious bonding.

Want to know more about how these two got together to launch uSamp? Check out their story:

About the authors:

Matt Dusig
“Co-Founder and CEO” barely scratches the surface of SoCal resident and serial entrepreneur, Matt Dusig. The wrangler of uSamp™ corporate strategy, technology and biz dev is a conceptual tinkerer, avid-cyclist, gamer-extraordinaire, and proud-dad. Product development is his passion; software initiatives, his strength; and market research, his game. Before jumpstarting uSamp™, Dusig logged-into the #mrx industry with goZing, a pioneer in online sampling acquired by Greenfield Online in 2005. His peers praise his rare combo of tech-savvy, business acumen and artistic vision carried over from his graphic design days at Cal State Northridge. If Dusig could have a superpower, it would be the lung-capacity of Lance Armstrong and the artistic vision of Steve Jobs. Ok so that’s two-but the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist dreams big. After all, elegant disruption should not be taken lightly.

Gregg Lavin
Colleagues depict president and co-founder of uSamp™, Gregg Lavin as a nimble straight-shooter, trend-spotter and pragmatic genius. A self-described ideas guy, Lavin is a walking, talking light bulb who is as passionate about changing user-experience as he is about his kids’ little league games. Under Lavin’s direction as a traffic driver and biz developer, uSamp™ has on-boarded 6.8 million panelists to the platform in under 3 years. Lavin’s no rookie – he laced-up his #mrx training sneaks with online sample pioneer, goZing, and lucratively logged-out to Greenfield Online in 2005. Lavin identifies with Job’s crazy ones, misfits, rebels, and troublemakers, as he thrives on model-breaking, industry-shaking concepts such as automation, gamification, and mobile technologies. The finalist for 2011′s Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award runs his company like his marathons – he knows that 26 miles means nothing without the extra 0.2. And he doesn’t plan to walk across the finish line.

Part II (read Part I)

Sourcing Respondents

These are just a few of the many issues that trackers bring to a researcher. At uSamp, we are frequently asked how the respondents for trackers can be sourced, what options are available and what are the benefits and drawbacks of each? Very generally, using an online panel, as well as an intercept methodology for a River solution, are both applicable. Here are some aspects to consider before making a choice about supporting ongoing data collection.

Online Panels – few MR companies with their own panels can support much volume for trackers by themselves. Anything other than a national, gen pop requirement will need support from third party sample providers, especially for quotas based on smaller markets, for demographic balancing such as ethnicity, oldest/youngest age groups, and those ever-elusive male respondents.

Rarely is a tracker of any size supported by only one supplier. A proportion or blend of several sources is the usual approach. Keeping the blend consistent is critical, of course – if you change the sourcing during the ongoing fielding of the project, data shifts could become attributable to where the respondents came from-not what they’re saying about your client’s product or services.

Given that an online panel will be used to support a tracker, here are some keys to success:

• a stable, but growing panel, due to exclusion rules (i.e., no repeat taking of the survey for many trackers, with “fresh” sample needed)
• a panel that’s also recruited the same way over time, and accessed for the tracker the same way every time
• very active and responsive project management who know how to set up quotas properly and implement the sampling process consistently
• continual monitoring, often throughout the day (east coast to west coast) and over weekends, so that any hiccups can be watched for and caught immediately

River

River support for trackers is an entirely different story. Look for a separate uSamp blog soon about the different River approaches in the market. For now, suffice to say that unless a River has several steps built in, such as recording respondent information and the ability to validate that information, if and as needed, you can readily encounter problems with exclusions, recontacts, duplication, inconsistent sample frames, and a whole host of bias effects. Done right, River support for a tracker is a thing of beauty and grace.

In conclusion, I will leave you with a few takeaways: Questions to ask your sample providers (and questions you should be prepared to answer if you are that supplier).

Ask any providers about their policies and practices for how they will address these aspects:

• How large is their proprietary panel?
• How fast is it growing?
• What is their scrub rate for panelists leaving or being removed from the panel vs. new panelists joining?
• How much of their proprietary panel are they supplying for a given project vs. aggregating other companies’ panels into their offering?

It is important to assess the health of sample provider’s resources, and determine whether they can sustain the required supply over time.

By asking these hard questions before you press go, you will set the foundation for a strong tracker that will  consistently yield results, and confidently deliver insights.

Scott “The Soapbox Professor” Worthge has been with uSamp from its first forays into the Market Research arena, joining the company in January 2009. His major role is working with clients for the development, conduct and completion of project engagements, where he brings 25 years of supplier-side MR experience to bear (from full service companies of various sizes, as well as with sample suppliers). Additionally within uSamp, Scott organizes and conducts training initiatives, primarily with sales staff. In his “spare” time, he’s a small business owner (of a neighborhood coffee shop), and an Instructor for the past eight years in UC Berkeley’s Extension program, teaching classes in Marketing Research, Strategic Brand Management, and other Marketing department subjects.

This is an introduction to our series on tracking studies. Over the next few posts we will be touching on some of the salient issues around this particular type of project. Why are tracking studies important? How are they executed? How are respondents sourced? And what key questions should you be asking your sample suppliers about their procedure? We hope you will share any examples, tips or opinions you have on trackers with us during this exploration.

Part I.

Trackers are the heartbeat of your marketplace. They provide a baseline against which changes in customer attitude and behavior can be identified and measured for products and services. These ongoing, standardized measurements are useful for measuring your target customer against the marketplace.

A few of the most common tracker projects revolve around:

• Financial services – bank/investment services, customer satisfaction
• Consumer goods and services – food, alcohol, technology, cosmetics, cars, restaurants, especially for ad testing and media campaign tracking
• Brand/corporate image monitoring

Basically, trackers are valuable to any client who has a need to gather information about their customers, or intended customers, over time to monitor changes for key metrics as well as look for surprises in consumer sentiment, ratings, etc. This is so often the case with fast moving goods purchased frequently by consumers or even businesses, but can apply to any company wanting to watch what’s happening, and investigate what’s moving the needle and how, for their market.

Executing a Tracker

For those used to a steady diet of ad hoc studies, trackers can be a different animal when it comes to setting up the support necessary to field these efficiently and effectively. Trackers require ongoing attention, with several additional unique requirements vs. the more common ad hoc projects.

A few important considerations:

• Continual project management for quota monitoring, especially for how survey completions are spread across the timing for data collection – quarterly, monthly, but even weekly or daily.
• Consistency in the methodology and sourcing for participants in the research.
• Replicable sample frames – ensuring the same process is being followed for each data collection period.
• Exclusions, to ensure that “fresh” respondents are providing data and to prevent bias due to familiarity with the survey.

These are just a few of the many issues that trackers bring to a researcher.

We would be interested to hear about your experiences with trackers. In particular, any considerations that we left out?

The next post will touch on how are respondents for trackers sourced, a question we get asked quite frequently at uSamp.