Sending and Targeting Surveys to Anyone With the New Distribution Link

The Pollfish platform just got much more powerful. We now offer another major way to deploy surveys so that researchers can target the exact people they seek to study for all of their research needs.

We’re thrilled to introduce the Distribution Link, a feature that completes the Pollfish survey distribution and deployment functionality. It is currently FREE to use this DIY market research tool. 

With this latest feature, you can target respondents in the most precise way: via their identities instead of their demographics, location, and other screening filters you’ll find on our platform.  

This feature fortifies your survey outreach process, arming you with the knowledge of specific respondents. As such, it provides a powerful addition to market research techniques and gives you the full Pollfish experience. 

This article explains the Pollfish  Distribution Link feature, so that you can apply it to all your unique respondent targeting needs.  

Understanding the Pollfish Distribution Link Product Feature

The Distribution Link is a new product feature for distributing your surveys to the exact targets you seek to complete them. It serves as an alternative to our current survey deployment method: that of random device engagement sampling or RDE sampling.

With RDE sampling, the Pollfish platform launches your survey to hundreds of thousands of highly-trafficked websites, mobile sites and apps, prompting random internet users to take your surveys. Of course, only those who qualify to take it based on your screening section are granted entry into the survey.

This way, only members of your targeted population will participate in your survey and they are targeted in a completely randomized way. While this strategy is useful and efficient, bringing you quality data and speed to insights, it was rather incomplete

This is not to say that you couldn’t extract high-quality data from the Pollfish platform through its survey fraud protection and quality checks system or that you couldn’t target people based on demographics, psychographics, location, etc via the RDE approach. In fact, that is exactly what the RDE method was built for: quick insights from a vast and random sampling pool.

While this is an innovative approach, it was incomplete in that it didn’t allow you to send your survey(s) yourself to specific individuals. But now you can with the Distribution Link feature

The Distribution Link allows researchers to send their survey(s) themselves to their exact targets, actual individuals rather than a random pool. But it can do much more.

Since this feature is a link, you can send it through various means and reap various benefits. 

Distribution Link Facts, Cost and How to Add it to Your Survey Campaign

The researcher can create a draft and instead of distributing it via the Pollfish network, they can generate a link that potential respondents can click on to reach the survey. As such, there will be no checkout page, but a link that researchers can share across mediums. 

The first release is available for all accounts for free.

The following explains how to apply the Distribution Link feature to your survey:

    1. Click on ‘’Create new survey’’ on the Pollfish platform.
    2. Then, select the option of “create a link” to share the survey.
    3. Select to start through a template or from scratch.
    4. You’ll then be directed to the Questionnaire page, where you can select your intended respondent demographics and other qualifications.
    5. You can also add screening questions that will allow or bar entry to the survey to respondents who answer them in a particular way.
    6. After filtering options in the Questionnaire page, Then you’ll be taken to the Questionnaire page, where you can design your questionnaire or alter the template.
    7. If you want to screen your audience do so through the ADL tab.
  • When you send a user to the end of a survey through the ADL tab, this is due to:
      1. A successful survey completion
      2. Screen out termination
      3. Profiling termination
      4. Quality termination

Please note the following changes we’ve made in 2022: 

Quality termination is replacing the Disqualification rules feature in the Distribution Link feature. Additionally, screenout and profiling terminations through ADL are replacing the Audience page and screening questions in this feature.

distribute a survey

distribute surveys

Capabilities and Benefits of the Distribution Link Feature

This feature presents a potent way to collect survey responses; as such, it is another means of survey sampling methods. It has a slew of various capabilities and benefits. The following lists all that researchers can do with the Distribution Link feature: 

  1. Appears as an easy-to-access, sharable link.
  2. Allows you to hyper-target your target market sample.
  3. Permits you to reach specific individuals.
  4. Grants you the power to survey consumers and leads at key moments in their customer journey. 
  5. Enables you to gain consumer opinions about events in their customer experience (CX) while they’re fresh on their minds.
  6. Allows you to understand what customers don’t like or where you went wrong as these events are still occurring.
  7. Gives you access into the minds of specific people, at specific times in their CX.
  8. Makes it possible to ask consumers about your company, specifically, their experience with it, as opposed to more general questions about their thoughts about your niche and cultural climate. 
  9. Brings you insights from key stakeholders and players in your industry and certain companies.
  10. Provides an alternative survey sampling approach you can use alongside RDE sampling, allowing you to conduct comparative analyses between the two sets of data.

Methods and Campaigns to Use with the Distribution Link Feature

The Distribution Link feature opens doors to conducting several key market research campaigns. It also augments your survey deployment by providing more methods of sending your surveys. This means you are not limited to sending the surveys to specific people through a single channel.

Instead, this feature offers far more options to carry out your research campaigns and reap critical data for decision making. As such, it diversifies your options for distributing your surveys, along with enabling you to carry out and refine critical business campaigns.

The following lists the different methods and campaigns you can use with the Distribution Link feature:

  1. Email Specific Targets
    1. This serves as the classic method for inviting targeted people to take your survey. 
    2. You ought to email consumers at specific times in their customer buying journey.
      1. There are various points in the customer journey and sales funnel that are opportune to survey your target market, such as: post-purchase, cart abandonment/ lack of purchase, bounces, email list sign-ups, a discussion with a representative, etc.
    3. There are several best practices you should use to increase your survey completion rate if you choose to email your targets.
  2. Social Media survey invitations.
    1. With the Distribution Link feature, you can copy/paste the link to the survey you want to deploy across any social media channel.
    2. This way, you can compare visitors from social media with other means of extracting data, whether it is with other Distribution LInk methods or via RDE sampling.
  3. B2B Feedback via B2B surveys
    1. You can gain critical insights with your business clients, vendors and partners to smooth various contracts, processes, integrations and other business dealings.
    2. With this feature, you can contact these entities directly, so you’ll know exactly who has provided answers to your survey.
    3. Create this survey type with the correct B2B survey questions
  4. Content Marketing Strategy campaigns
    1. With RDE sampling, you cannot reach out to specific site users that visited and interacted with your website and its content.
    2. With the Distribution Link feature, you can survey people who have interacted with your content, are subscribed to your newsletter, visit your site regularly, have signed up for a mailing list, etc.
    3. The link allows you to attach your brand and its experience to the survey, which is also useful for brand visibility.
  5. Demand Generation campaigns
    1. If you do not want to directly mention your survey in social media or email messages/campaigns, you can still use the Distribution Link in your landing pages.
    2. This provides a more indirect way to access your survey, however, a landing page can provide an in-depth explanation, or a bulleted list describing your survey.
    3. Use CTAs in your landing pages to link to your Distribution Link survey.
  6. Employee Feedback Survey Campaigns
    1. Send surveys to your team only, or even specific departments with various employee-facing surveys.
    2. Use the employee satisfaction survey or the eNPS survey to gauge employee fulfillment, happiness and how likely they are to recommend working at your organization.
    3. Keep burnout at bay with the employee burnout survey
    4. Recognize high-performing and hard-working employees with the employee recognition survey.

How to Use the Feature

  1. Create your questionnaire
  2. Select if you want to ask a question and screen the respondents (for profiling, quality, or screener) through the ADL. 
  3. The Link Settings page is combined with the Share page title  :
    1. Set up maximum responses if need be.
    2. Allow multiple responses from the same respondent.
    3. Select if you want to be informed of new responses.
    4. Set an expiration date for your survey.
    5. Add a custom “thank you” message.
    6. Select what will occur when a respondent adds a complete
      1. Send them to the Pollfish homepage.
      2. Send them to the results.
      3. Add custom redirect links.
  4. The results will be the same as regular ones, with the ability to delete a response.

Passthrough Parameters

This is a new implementation for 2022. In conjunction with the redirect URLs, we now support passthrough parameters. This feature allows researchers to pass different identifiers and parameters through the distribution entry link and redirect URL’s for each respondent or a batch of respondents. All parameters are also saved and are available at the XLS export.

distribute survey

Passthrough parameters allow you to pass information to and from a website by simply adding, or appending, specific information to the end of a URL.

You can append as many parameters as you want to your survey link.So what is their purpose in the context of market research? They enable researchers to pass different identifiers, AKA, parameters through survey URLs. The respondents then retrieve them through the redirect URLs.

They are predominantly used to track and match a respondent with a certain response. In Pollfish, you append the user ID at the entry URL and retrieve it at the redirect URL. 

By doing so, you can match a respondent profile from the Pollfish respondent pool with a response on a Distribution Link survey.

Personalizing Your Survey Campaigns

Personalization is crucial in marketing and market research and with the Distribution Link feature, you have the option of personalizing your survey to its targeted respondents. You may know exactly who you seek to target if you’re setting up a B2B survey with a client, vendor or partner.

Or, if a customer on your website provides their key identifying details, such as their name, location, email address and more, this also gives you an avenue for personalization. You can then set up a personalized survey and send it to specific individuals with the Distribution Link.The key is to use a strong online survey platform like Pollfish, which now arms you with this link feature that makes it easy to make your own survey in only three steps. With the Distribution Link feature, Pollfish empowers your market research and general research campaigns more than ever before.