HOW DO WE COLLECT DATA?

Depending on your goal and your budget, there’s two ways we collect data.

• YOUR CUSTOMER LIST. We can use email based methods to contact your current customers and ask them to participate in a survey. Customers can respond for free, or with incentives such as product discounts.
• PANELS.  We can use panel-based methods, which involve paying to recruit and incentivize the ideal respondent.  These panelists allow for a broader range in characteristics than just your customer list.

HOW DO WE COLLECT DATA WITH PANELS?

To ensure we reach the right participants for your study, we partner with trusted panel providers. There are two types of panel provides. We have access to over 800 intercept suppliers and 4500 panel databases, allowing us to access a wide range of qualified individuals.

• PANEL DATABASES are companies that collect groups of people who sign up ahead of time to take surveys. They usually get some kind of reward for participating, like points or money. 
• INTERCEPT SUPPLIERS are companies that reach out to people to take surveys. This can happen in person (e.g., in a mall) or online via a social media post or ad.

HOW DO WE KNOW THESE ARE QUALITY RESPONDENTS?

We employ a number of respondent quality and data quality measures to ensure you’re getting good quality data. We also partner with our panel providers to ensure they’re following the latest and greatest techniques to recruiting and using quality respondents. Together, we and our partners employ methods to protect against:

• Bots or AI survey-takers
• Speeders
• “Garbage” responses
• Non-responsive overuse
• Inconsistent or illogical responses
• Inaccurate responses

To find out more about our respondent quality methods and measures, please visit XX.

HOW ARE PANEL RESPONDENTS INCENTIVIZED?

We customize every piece of research. This means sometimes your research audience might be very general (e.g., Cereal consumers), and other times it might be very specific (e.g., Neurosurgeons in Massachusetts). Depending on your audience, we work with different panels who we think can best deliver on your audience. Every panel incentivizes respondents differently. However, the primary methods of incentive include: cash, gift cards, points, loyalty rewards, or donations.

WHAT IS CPI OR CPC?

• CPI stands for "Cost-Per-Interview"
• CPC stands for "Cost-Per-Complete"

Both of these terms are interchangeable for the cost it takes on person to take a survey.  Multiplying this cost by the number of people you want in your survey will give you the total estimated cost of the survey.

WHAT AFFECTS CPI/CPC?

There are three things that affect the cost per complete:

1. How specific an audience you are targeting for the survey
   • The more specific the audience, the more expensive the CPC
     
     
2. How many questions you include in the survey to "screen" respondents out
   • The more “screeners” you put in a survey, the more expensive the CPC
     
     
3. The length of the survey
   • The longer the survey, the more expensive the CPC

DO YOU HAVE CPI/CPC CAPS?

Yes and no. We provide an estimated CPI right before we launch the project to collect data. If your CPI increases by 10%, we automatically pause the project. We’ll need formal approval before we can continue at the revised CPI. This policy is because CPI is just an estimate. We can never truly know the price of respondents on the marketplace until your survey is live. This is because, like any other market, price is set by a complicated exchange of supply and demand. Our “10% Pause Policy” is there to protect your budget, and to allow us to optimize your project if we can.

WHEN WILL WE KNOW THE REAL CPI/CPC?

Our data collection process has two steps:

• Soft launch. In this step of the process, we launch the survey and collect 10% of your overall sample. So if your survey is supposed to collect 1000 people, we’ll launch is to only 100. We do this for a few reasons:
  • To ensure survey programming is correct and respondents don’t get stuck anywhere
  • To ensure data is being collected properly across all questions
  • To gauge respondent fatigue
  • To check on other optimizations
    
    
• Full Launch. In this step of the process, we’ve tested your survey and optimized it. So we launch to the remaining 90% of the sample for your project.

We’ll have an idea as to what your CPI is after the soft-launch step.

WHAT IS SAMPLE TARGETING?

When determining the right sample for you, we first identify who you want to target. “Targeting criteria” are definable demographics, psychographics, technographics and purchase behaviors we have in the database.

For example, some characteristics we can target include: gender, age, income, ethnicity, race, marital status, recent purchases, etc.

WHAT IS SAMPLE SCREENING?

When we cannot target certain characteristics, we screen for them. To screen respondents, we insert questions into the survey that terminate respondents. “Terminating” a respondent happens when a respondent does not select the right answer.

For example if a survey requires the respondent to be aware of “Coca-Cola”, then there will be a question in the survey that asks this. If the respondent doesn’t select “Coca-Cola”, they’ll be “terminated”. When a respondent is terminated, they’re kicked out of the survey, and don’t get incentivized for it.

TERMS VS COMPLETE?

There are three classifications of respondents:

• Terms - this is an abbreviation of “terminated”. As discussed above, these are respondents who “screen out” of the survey because they don’t have the right characteristics
• Completes - These are respondents who finish the whole survey 
• Partials - These are respondents who stop taking the survey part of the way through, and never finish the survey.

DO I PAY FOR TERMS AND PARTIALS?

You ONLY pay for those respondents who COMPLETE the survey in full. 

You do not pay for terms or partials. 

However, terms and partials do affect your CPI. This is because the Incidence Rate (IR) is affected by the number of terms and partials you have. More specifically, IR is calculated by:

Completes / (Completes + Terms + Partials)

The lower the IR, the higher the CPI