Prodege & Pollfish Unite to Improve Audience Quality + Add 6,979 New Behavior Targeting Criteria!
Improved Audience Quality + 6,979 New Behavior Targeting Criteria! 🎯
Many of you have asked and we’ve listened. We’ve just finished a major upgrade to Pollfish audiences to empower our research community like never before. 🥳 Starting today, you'll gain the following benefits within the platform:
5 Ways This Enhances Your Research Experience ✨
- Reach niche audiences using
6,979 unique validated behaviors. - Access to Prodege’s tried and
tested loyalty program members. - Quality checks that meet
ESOMAR Gold Standard. - Combine behaviors and sentiment
targets to understand the “why”. - Recontact respondents for
longitudinal tracking.
"So, exactly what can I target?"
I'm glad you asked!
4 New Behavioral Targeting Criteria 🛒
The new behaviors are best bucketed into the four following categories, and can be drilled down into sub-categories, and even down to specific stores, brands, sites, and locations.
Brand Purchases 🛍️ | Consumer Lifestyle 🧬 | Website Visits 📲 | Location Visits 🏬 |
- Ruffles - Dr. Pepper -Angel Soft - Tabasco - Etc. | - Finance - Travel - Wellness - Gaming - Etc. | - BuyBuyBaby - CNN - Quora Etc. | - Target - Costco - 7-Eleven - Papa Johns - Etc. |
The full list of behavioral targeting criteria can be seen here: Google Sheet: 2024 Audience Upgrade 2024
Selecting Behavioral Audiences in 2 Clicks ✅
Click 1: From the survey creation page simply navigate to the audiences tab. There you will find two new sections: Consumer Lifestyle and Behavioral Data. Expand the dropdown and click a category.
Click 2: You’ll now be shown that category on the left, in which case you can type or select from thousands of validated website visits as shown in the image below:
In addition to this, you can even add quotas to your behavioral selections, or suppress specific selections to get very specific respondents for your surveys!
Preview All Targeting Criteria 🔮
To preview all of the targeting criteria, access the massive list of 6,979 behaviors here:
Google Sheet: 2024 Audience Upgrade 2024
Already a user? Some changes you'll see in the platform.
To make these upgrades, we've had to make some other changes within the platform.
You'll notice:
- Screening questions now live under the "questionnaire page"
- Completion time has been switched to a yes or no feasibility calculation.
First-party behavior data, powered by Prodege.
This is all now possible thanks to Prodege’s unique blend of owned and operated publishers, to help you achieve granularity from a more representative and reliable data source. The Prodege proprietary panels are Swagbucks, InboxDollars, MyPoints, and Upromise. Each panel has a unique profile given they cater to people with different interests and because our recruiting methods and incentives differ for each, allowing for a more even and representative audience.
Validated behavior are collected with member consent and in accordance with privacy laws from app and web browsing, supermarket receipts submitted by members and verified online purchases.
Ready to try our new behaviors? They're available right now on our platform. Simply select the targeting criteria you need, and let us do the rest! Whether you're a seasoned Pollfish user or new to our platform, our team of experts is here to help you.
More Than DIY – New Services on Our Platform!
New Services on Our Platform! 🎉
Get ready for some exciting news! Pollfish, your go-to DIY market research platform, has just leveled up! Thanks to our partnership with Prodege, we now offer additional services directly through our platform. This means that Pollfish clients can now access the whole suite of Prodege market research services in a snap!
🤝 Pollfish & Prodege: A Dynamic Duo
While some of you are familiar with our relationship with Prodege, many of you may not be aware of the valuable services they offer. To make life easier, we've integrated a section in our platform for users to select Prodege services directly. Let's take a closer look at what's new!
📢 Announcing 7 New Services at Your Fingertips!
🎤 Qualitative / IHUT Recruitment - Need engaged participants for online qualitative research, focus groups, IDIs, or IHUTs? Our sampling experts have your back! Ensure the right audience is recruited for valuable insights, improving research reliability.
📚 Questionnaire Design Support - Optimize your questionnaire design with the help of our team of experts! Achieve better data quality and reduce potential biases through a well-designed questionnaire.
🎩 Sample Management - Let our team set up quotas (including nested quotas) and manage fieldwork to ensure you reach your target audience. Streamline fieldwork and reduce sampling errors for more accurate and representative data.
💻 Survey Programming - Need to program a survey from a document? Our in-house team provides quick turnaround on surveys from simple to complex. Save time and effort while ensuring your survey is programmed accurately and efficiently.
🌐 Translations - Have your surveys and open-ended responses translated/back-translated into 50+ languages by our team of native speakers. Reach a global audience and enhance cross-cultural understanding with accurate translations.
📊 Data Tables, Visualization & Dashboards - Create custom, branded dashboards or PowerPoint charts and graphs using our innovative Insights Builder tool. Make your data more understandable and visually appealing for impactful presentations.
📈 Topline Insights Report - Collaborate with our insights experts to generate topline reports with key findings from your survey data. Quickly identify essential trends and findings, simplifying data-driven decision making.
DIY to DI-WHY-Not: Expanding Your Capabilities
We know that Pollfish users are used to doing things themselves. However, we also understand that you may be pressed for time, need help, or require market research services beyond our capabilities. With our new Prodege-powered services, you no longer have to choose between DIY and expert assistance. You can have it all! By teaming up with Prodege, we're providing you with a seamless, end-to-end market research experience that saves you time 🕒, money 💰, and resources 🌳.
How It Works
As you’ll see in the screenshot below, all you need to do is select services tab on the left when you're logged into the Pollfish platform, and you'll be able to select from these 7 services, in which you'll be connected with the appropriate expert:
A Celebration of Collaboration
Ready to try our new services? They're available right now on our platform. Simply select the Prodege services you need, and let us do the rest! Whether you're a seasoned Pollfish user or new to our platform, our team of experts is here to help you take your market research to the next level.
Let's make market research more accessible, efficient, and enjoyable together! Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity to enhance your research capabilities and achieve even greater success with Pollfish and Prodege! 🥳
Pollfish's New Platform Design
Pollfish's New Platform Design
Pollfish has revamped its user interface to enhance the experience for survey creators and to pave the way for numerous exciting features this year.
There are two main changes.
Update #1: New survey summary page.
Section 1: Survey Overview.
Need a quick overview of your survey? This section provides information on survey status. Depending on your survey type, this may include statuses such as draft, pending, paused, active, completed. You will also find other relevant information such as incidence rate (IR), estimated length of interview (LOI), completion rate, languages, translations, a brief preview, and easy access to downloads.
Section 2: Survey Performance.
Looking for insight into completion time? This section helps you visualize your survey's completion rate with a straightforward time series chart, and additional details on completion.
Section 3: Audience Snapshot.
Want to verify your target audience quickly? Obtain a concise snapshot of the selected audience(s), including all preselected demographic targeting criteria.
Section 4: Status Funnel.
Curious about drop-offs in your survey? This section enables you to see the number of people reaching each stage of the survey. Depending on your survey this may include stages such as accepted, passed profiling, passed screening, started survey, and finished survey.
Update #2: New menu navigation.
You might notice a subtle change in Pollfish's layout. Folders and surveys now appear in a panel on the left, while account details have moved from the top-right corner to the bottom-left corner.
This update allows direct access to surveys nested in folders from the side panel and, more importantly, prepares the interface for advantageous features arriving this year.
Major upgrade to Pollfish AI survey builder
Major upgrade to Pollfish AI survey builder
Attention all researchers, marketers, and data enthusiasts! Pollfish's AI Survey Builder just got even better! We're proud to introduce our latest upgrade, which includes Maxdiff and Conjoint Analysis questions in addition to our existing arsenal of question types. The days of laboriously creating surveys are over – the Pollfish AI Survey Builder has got you covered!
The More, The Merrier: New Question Types Galore 🌟
Our upgraded AI Survey Builder now offers an impressive array of question types:
- Single Selection
- Multiple Selection
- Numeric Open-ended
- Text Open-ended
- Rating
- Ranking
- Sliders
- Maxdiff (Maximum Difference Scaling) 🆕
- Conjoint Analysis 🆕
With this major upgrade, your surveys can be more comprehensive and engaging than ever, allowing you to capture a wide range of insights from your target audience.
How It Works 🛠
As you'll see in this example below, all you need to do is select the type of survey you'd like to create.
On the left, you'll find a dropdown below where you'd normally enter your prompt, with options for:
- Main question types
- Conjoint method
- Maxdiff method
Simply pick the type of survey to auto create, and let the magic happen!
Pretty cool, right?
A Whopping 42,978 Survey Prompts Entered & Counting! 🚀
In just three months, we've had a jaw-dropping 42,978 survey prompts entered into the Pollfish AI Survey Builder! This outstanding number speaks volumes about the trust and value users place in our AI-powered tool. And now, we're taking it up a notch with the introduction of Maxdiff and Conjoint Analysis questions in our latest upgrade. Say goodbye to tedious survey creation – the Pollfish AI Survey Builder has your back!
In Conclusion: Join the AI Revolution Today!
It's time to embrace the future of survey creation! With the latest upgrade to our Pollfish AI Survey Builder, you'll be able to enjoy more the in-depth research capabilities you're already used to... But it will be:
- Way faster to create - thanks to Pollfish AI 2.0.
- Way faster to run - thanks to the massive global reach of the Pollfish audience.
- And soon, way faster to interpret your results - thanks to planned future feature releases.
So, what are you waiting for? Join the AI revolution and try out the upgraded Pollfish AI Survey Builder today!
Organic Random Device Engagement For Better Survey Research
8 Ways Survey Research is Better with Organic Random Device Engagement
This is an excerpt from a recent academic paper written by Dr. David Rothschild, Economist at Microsoft Research & Dr. Tobias Konitzer, C.S.O. and co-founder of PredictWise.
Organic random device engagement (RDE) polling relies on advertising networks, or other portals on devices, to engage random people where they are. One of the most common versions of this is within advertising modules on smartphones, but it can easily be placed in gaming, virtual reality, etc.
Survey respondents are asked to participate in a poll in exchange for an incentive token that stays true to the philosophy of the app in which they are organically engaged. This method has a number of advantages:
1. Fast
RDE can be extremely fast. RDD takes days (and weeks in some cases). Using social networks (assisted crowdsourcing) can be done a little faster, but still lacks speed compared to RDE. Using online panels is comparable in speed, if you pay for extra respondents from a merged panel (online panels will charge extra to get respondents from other panels to increase speed).
2. Cost-effective
RDE is extremely inexpensive compared with other sampling 12 options. The major RDE providers, like Pollfish, Dalia or Tap Research, charge 10% the cost of RDD, 20% the cost of using assisted crowdsourcing, and 25% the cost of online panels.
3. Coverage is good and growing
Accuracy is good because coverage is good. And, while RDE is still behind RDD in coverage at this time, it will reach parity soon. Coverage is similar to social media-based assisted crowdsource polling and much better than with online panels. Online panels have a very small footprint, which also affects their ability to get depth in population.
4. Response rate is solid
Pollfish reports a reasonable response rate (much higher than RDD), conditional on being targeted for a poll (to completion of the survey, that is). Online panels have low sign-up rates and high drop out but do not post comparable response rates. Social media-based polling, in assisted crowdsourcing, is reliant on ads that suffer from a very low click-through.
5. Flexible
RDE is meant to be flexible with the growth of devices. It should provide a seamless experience across device types. RDD is stuck with telephones, by definition. And, RDD is subject to interviewer effects (albeit to a smaller extent than in-person surveys), meaning that tone of voice can influence considerations of the respondent, or trigger undesired interviewer respondent interactions, ultimately introducing measurement error. RDE, with its streamlined experience, is not subject to this kind of error. (Tucker 1983; West and Blom 2017)
6. Telemetry data
RDE is able to supplement collected attitudinal data with a rich array of para or telemetry data. As we know, people who answer surveys are fundamentally different than people who do not. As the progressive analytics shop, CIVIS has argued recently, a battery of nearly 30 additional demographic, attitudinal, and lifestyle questions that get at notions of social trust and cosmopolitanism is necessary to be able to weight and correct for all the ways in which survey respondents are unusual. As Konitzer, Eckman and Rothschild (2016) argue, telemetry data is a much more cost-effective (and unobtrusive) way to collect these variables. Home and work location, commuting or mobility patterns or the political makeup of one's neighborhood or social network, derived from satellite-based (read: extremely accurate) longitudinal location-coordinate data predict demographic variables well, such as race and income. And, applications on the device can more accurately describe political traits prone to erroneous self-report, such as frequency of political discussion, political engagement or knowledge.
7. RDE will get stronger in the future
Penetration of devices will further increase in the future, increasing reach of RDE in the US, and making RDE the only viable alternatives in less developed markets. But the rosy future for RDE is not just about penetration. Advances in bridging Ad IDs with other known identifiers in the American market, such as voter file IDs, Experian Gold IDs, etc., mean that individual targeting based on financial history or credit card spending patterns will be possible. And, RDE will be able to adopt list-based polling, in which political survey firms poll directly from the voter file, large-scale administrative data detailing the turnout and registration history of 250,000,000 Americans.
8. River sampling is different, as devices are unknown
River sampling can either mean banner-ad based polling or engagement with respondents via legacy websites or similar places RDE recruits from. In contrast to RDE, devices are unknown to river samplers: River sampling usually does not have access to the Ad ID, introducing two huge disadvantages: River samples have no way to address SUMA it is possible for fraudsters to engage with the same poll twice to increase chances to win the price for participation, especially if it comes in the form of financial incentives. And, any degree of demographic/geographic (not to mention individual) targeting is virtually impossible. In addition, banner ads themselves, similar to social-media ads, suffer from disastrous response rates. Good RDE polling is done with the cooperation of the publisher, providing a native experience, while banners ads are pushed through the ad-network. This degraded user experience depresses response rates and can introduce serious measurement error.
Second, ad-networks optimize their delivery in a way that fights against the random sample. The users are chosen because they are more likely to respond, due to unobserved variables (at least to the survey researcher), that are correlated with how they will respond. As this underlying data is never shared, it is impossible to correct for by the survey researcher.
However, just like every other modern online survey sampling method (RDD, assisted crowdsourcing, online panels), RDE relies on non-probability sampling. There is no sample method (anymore) that has perfect coverage and known probabilities for any respondent. This is one of the reasons we have developed analytics to overcome known biases. And, RDE has bias that we understand and can overcome, and additional data points that add to the power of correcting bias, such as telemetry data that is not available to RDD. While RDD has shifting and shrinking coverage, online panels suffer from panel fatigue and panel conditioning, and assisted crowdsourcing has survey bias introduced by efficient but to the polling firm nontransparent targeting algorithms that cannot be addressed, RDE is our method of choice, and the future, in the ever-changing market of polling.
Examples of RDE
Here we review work published in both Goel, Obeng and Rothschild (2015) and Konitzer, Corbett-Davies and Rothschild (N.d.) to showcase how effective RDE samples can be. And, add examples from the 2017-2018 special congressional elections.
Example 1:
(Goel, Obeng and Rothschild 2015) shows how RDE, through Pollfish, is able to closely match gold-standard polling such as the General Social Survey. This gold-standard uses yet another method: house-calls. This is unaffordable for most research, so we have left it off of this paper, but it provides a useful benchmark.
Example 2:
(Konitzer, Corbett-Davies and Rothschild N.d.) shows how RDE, utilizing the Pollfish platform, is able to closely match RDD polling in the 2016 election (actually doing slightly better). This is an example of using RDE samples with an analytic method call Dynamic MRP. The analytics methods are detailed in their paper.
When (Konitzer, Corbett-Davies and Rothschild N.d.) quantifies their state-by-state errors, they show that their predictions based on a single poll are not significantly worse than the predictions from poll aggregators. They compare their state-by-state estimates against the actual outcome. Compared to poll aggregator Huffington Post Pollster, their Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is only slightly higher: 4.24 percentage points vs. 3.62 percentage points (for 50 states excluding DC).
When they focus on the 15 closest states, predictive accuracy is even higher. The RMSE is 2.89 percentage points, compared to 2.57 percentage points of Huffington Post Pollster. Overall, besides binary accuracy the RDE-based polling predictions also have a low error in the precise percentage value.
This is illustrated in Figure 1.
Not only are RDE-based polling state-by-state estimations fairly accurate, they also add meaningful signal to the poll aggregations. The left panel of Figure 2 displays the correlation between state-by-state errors of our predictions and the state-by-state errors of Huffington Post Pollster, and the right panel compares the distribution of errors across their approach and Huffington Post Pollster. At the very least, using RDE has significant potential to increase the quality of aggregators, as we discuss more below.
Example 3:
During the course of 2017 and 2018 polling firms have employed all three new methods in predicting Congressional election outcomes: RDE comes out way above the other two.
In this paper we outlined four methods of data collection for surveys. The first method, Random Digit Dialing (RDD), is the traditional method, working fine, but it is doomed in the next few years. Thus, the paper is really about which of the new online survey sampling methods will replace it: online panels, Assisted Crowdsourcing, or Random Device Engagment (RDE). We believe strongly that RDE is the future.