What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research
What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research
A research panel is a frequently used means for conducting research, including market research (the study of your customers). This method involves studying the same group of opted-in participants through various methods and stages that are developed as part of a research campaign.
The technique that underpins a research panel counters organic sampling, which seeks out research participants, particularly survey respondents, in their natural digital habitats. As such, a research panel is an alternative to random sampling and has various differentiations.
You ought to know all the differentiators of research panels, how they stray from organic sampling, as well as what makes a research panel tick.
With this key information at hand, it will make your research endeavors simpler; it will also allow you to choose the best research method. This is a must, considering that there is a wide range of market research techniques. Panels are just one of many.
You may be wondering if panel research is a viable research method for your business needs or research campaign. Or, you may consider using it in tandem with another research technique or tool.
Luckily, we’ve got you covered on this topic.
This article explains the concept of the research panel in full depth, which can serve as a possible avenue market researchers can explore within the vast array of market research techniques.
What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research? Table of Contents
- Defining the Research Panel
- The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process
- When to Use a Research Panel</a
- The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel
- Research Panel Examples
- Why Online Polling Software is Better
- The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative
- What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for Your Market Research Campaign
- The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research
Defining the Research Panel
A market research panel is a pre-recruited and pre-screened group of research participants who have opted in to take part as the studied subjects of a market research campaign.
This kind of research method can involve studying its members repeatedly. In this case, the particular study is called a panel study.
It is also referred to as a longitudinal study, although longitudinal studies don’t necessarily need to involve panels, as there can be longitudinal surveys completed by non-panelists.
As such, it is a way of describing those who have agreed to take surveys on an ongoing basis, which, in market research, are typically members of your target market.
You can use a research panel for a wide range of subject matters. The members of the research panel can include a wide range of people across multiple sets of populations.
Whether you seek to study the workforce of a company or a major constituent of a national population, the term research panel can apply to all such groups.
The key is to use participants who represent members of your target market and most importantly your target audience also referred to as your survey target audience. That’s because a research panel is a recruitment method used to get respondents to take your survey.
In market research, the participants in a research panel are usually the people who belong to a business’s consumer base.
Moreover, they belong to a particular audience, known specifically as a survey target audience in survey studies. This label can also apply to research panelists, as they too can be asked to take surveys.
The members making up a research panel must share several traits, such as demographics, psychographics, geographic location and more. A market researcher may also study various segments that make up a target market.
There are various methods researchers can employ in their research campaigns, in which a research panel provides insights. These include:
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Surveys
- In-home usage tests
- Experimentations
- Test marketing
The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process
A research panel is but one process within the encompassing practice of market research. Some businesses may decide to extract data from a research panel alone, while others may use it alongside probability sampling.
Also called organic sampling, this method involves reaching out to all the individuals who fall under the qualifications of your subjects of study. As such, it allows more individuals to take part in the sample.
Unlike many of the sub-methods of organic sampling, a research panel is not anonymous, in the sense that the panelists’ identities will not be hidden from the researcher.
They are still kept anonymous when it comes to sharing the findings with the public, as you wouldn’t reveal the panelists’ identities.
This allows researchers to study the members at a greater depth, in that researchers can match answers with the respondents themselves. This is due to the nature of pre-recruiting participants; when you do so, you’re going to need to collect information on each panelist, some of which may be personal.
This method will allow you to understand if they’re qualified to partake in your studies. As such, you’re effectively putting names and faces with data, essentially identifying each member. Additionally, this allows you to build a profile on each participant, adding bulk by applying multiple studies.
Forming profiles gives you a glimpse into the presence of personas in your target market. A research panel is the starting point in building a persona.
When you’ve profiled panelists through various means (interviews, focus groups, etc.), you have several kinds of data, from which you can form an analysis and draw conclusions.
You can test the prevalence of these conclusions by surveying other members of your target market, i.e., those who are not in the research panel.
Various survey sampling methods will not only complement your research panel but also give it validity and statistical relevance. After all, there are only so many panelists you can interview or meet with.
Even if you study your research panel via surveys, it is not practical to spend a lofty amount of time vetting people to ensure they fit your research campaign. Thus, a research panel may not be the strongest of the various market research techniques.
When to Use a Research Panel
While businesses and market researchers can use a research panel liberally, it is not always in their best interest. This can be due to the size of a business, a limited budget, the objectives of a research campaign and the length of the research study. There are also times when it makes sense to engage in research yourself and other times in which it may be beneficial to work through a professional market research agency such as IntoTheMinds.
With this in mind, there are particular times in which companies and researchers alike can benefit from using a research panel. These include the following instances:
- Obtaining a constant, in-depth read of a certain group of participants.
- Conducting a more intimate study on a particular group of people.
- Running continuous studies on the same people, ie, for longitudinal studies.
- Gathering data on subjects with scant studies due to rarities. Ex: people aged 100+
- Large research projects that will involve multiple modes of data collection
- When you are performing market segmentation.
- When you are building research or customer personas.
- To fulfill the preference of conducting research in a group setting.
- To gain insights on a topic that you may not have considered from your list of questions/concerns.
- These insights typically arise in conversations, as participants bring up points and considerations that you may not have originally thought of when forming your research plan.
- To assist or act as a helping agent in conjunction with another form of research, such as survey studies.
The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel
The research panel tactic offers advantages and disadvantages that all market researchers should be privy to. Like other research techniques, it is not perfect and for some, the disadvantages may outweigh the benefits, while to other researchers, the opposite may be true.
You should mull over both the advantages and disadvantages that come with this form of research.
The following lists the advantages and drawbacks of using a research panel.
The Pros
- Panel members have a more advanced understanding of the research topic since they can be recruited through a longer vetting process.
- It can be used multiple times on the same survey, to study change within a particular group that represents segments of your target market.
- It’s easier to conduct in recurring intervals, given that you have all the panelists’ information and don’t need to screen them as you would with a new set of participants.
- Deeper reads and longer researcher/panelist interactions are suitable for the 3 main types of survey research methods.
- It is much easier to follow up with panelists, should you need more research, as you already have their contact information.
The Cons
- Lack of privacy: face-to-face interviews, along with phone interviews in which researchers know the identities of panelists can be intimidating.
- Even a panel study lacks privacy, which can lead to intimidation or fear of answering honestly.
- Acquiescence bias: along with other biases, this issue can take shape, as respondents may feel pressured to answer in a particular way, leading to forced or inaccurate responses.
- Panel attrition: Due to re-interviewing, research panels are susceptible to fatigue, loss of interest, or pressure (Points 1, 2), making them easy candidates for attrition.
- Ingenuine change of attitude/ opinion: Interviewing and reinterviewing can change attitudes, in ways that are not always genuine, due to re-interviewing.
- Expensive: Whether you hire an in-house panel or use an external one, it is often an expensive affair, as you will need to pay each panelist. Since this is an ongoing study, you may have to pay them for each session.
- Poor data quality: This is especially true when a panel member is a participant in multiple panel companies.
- The quality of the data may be compromised when a respondent is a member of two or more panels.
- This is because the respondent may partake in the same survey.
- If they answer the same way, you will have duplicate data, but if they answer differently, there might be bias. At any rate, you’re getting data from the same person twice, which doesn’t improve the trustworthiness of research findings.
- Missing out on a larger survey pool: This relates to the aforementioned lack of privacy. Not everyone in your target audience will want to give away their contact info, let alone have their answers be tied to their identity.
- As such, you may not get enough participants for the specific quantity required for your survey sampling size.
Research Panel Examples
A research panel can be applied to all kinds of scenarios and has various use cases. Remember, they can be applied to both long and short-term research, despite being associated with the former more often.
They can be used in market research, which is for business purposes and is centered on customers. Or, they can be used for a wide range of other research types, such as medical, scientific, social, behavioral and educational research.
To help you better understand research panels, the following list includes seven examples of them across different areas of study:
- A business studying the customer buying behavior of three of its customer market segments.
- This is especially useful to compare segments with high and low consumer loyalty.
- A university research group studying the effects of sleep deprivation among students over a semester or year.
- An enterprise company seeking to release the most resonating ad campaigns by comparing how it's received across the world.
- A condiment manufacturer who is interested in comparing flavor and texture preferences across different parts of the country.
- A business that is intent on following its target market’s shopping habits and how they compare to their competitors.
- This will need to involve research on competitors. That means you’ll need to inquire about them in the panel, as well as perform secondary research to complement the study.
- A healthcare company seeking to find the relationship between device usage and obesity.
- A government program that tracks the success of a new social program for certain populations.
Why Online Polling Software is Better
Online polling software trumps research panels for a variety of objective reasons. There are also various subjective and preference-based justifications for leveraging an online survey tool instead of a research panel.
Organic Sampling and RDE
First off, online survey platforms allow you to run random organic sampling, which allows you to reach non-professional survey takers and gain a far larger reach than you otherwise would have.
This is because organic sampling involves what’s known as Random Device Engagement (RDE), a kind of polling that relies on advertising networks and other portals on devices, to engage random people where they are, voluntarily.
Additionally, in Random Device Engagement, the surveys are delivered to users in their natural digital environments, capturing them where they prefer to be. They were not pre-recruited and thus do not face the same pressures and conditioning that they would in a research panel.
As such, they are more likely to answer questions truthfully, as they have no one to answer to, are kept anonymous and have nothing to lose.
Greater Privacy
With far more privacy afforded to them, respondents of organic sampling surveys are also less vulnerable to acquiescence bias and all the other biases that involve the respondents’ reputation.
On the other hand, there’s polling software. This method, as aforesaid, provides respondents with the most privacy, as they are not pre-recruited or pre-screened. In many cases, polling software reaches respondents organically, which affords respondents the most amount of privacy.
Some survey platforms (such as Pollfish), allow you to send surveys to specific individuals instead of simply across a vast network of online platforms; in this case, the study won’t be as private. However, it is another deployment option to expand how you run your survey study.
Greater Reach to Research Participants
It also has a far greater reach to respondents. This, however, will depend on the online survey platform you use. We suggest one that allows you to conduct global surveys with the same ease as you would with local surveys.
Upfront Incentives
When you use an online survey platform, survey incentives are usually mentioned upfront. This is typically the case with a survey platform that partners with gaming sites and other digital platforms that offer in-app awards, which can be either monetary or non-monetary.
With incentives being offered (or at least mentioned) at the fore, all kinds of customers will be more willing to participate in the survey study.
Less Time Consuming
Moreover, an online polling platform isn’t as time-consuming for respondents. This is because such a platform does not simply conduct longitudinal studies — and even when it does, it can target random people who fit into certain customer profiles and customer personas.
It is also far less time-consuming for researchers. That’s because they don’t need to conduct interviews or other actions to recruit participants; the polling software does it for them. As such, it’s a win-win for all the people involved in the study: the respondents and the researchers.
Less Room for Attrition, Boredom and Bias
As such, it isn’t reliant on using the same people repeatedly to take part in a study. In this way, it cuts survey attrition. This is because some panel members may feel exhausted, burned out or simply frustrated with having to continuously be part of a study, especially if it covers the same subject.
As such, using polling software grants you the opportunity to ward off boredom from your respondents, as well as gain accurate responses. As mentioned earlier, panelists are far more prone to acquiescence bias and other biases.
Respondents of a polling platform offering organic sampling are at a far lower risk of being biased or getting bored. The latter is especially true in a platform that offers a mobile-first environment. After all, mobile dominates online web traffic, as over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Thus, a good survey design, especially one built for the mobile space creates a pleasant survey experience, one that intrigues respondents to take a survey in the first place, and most importantly, complete it.
Aside from these advantages that online polling offers over research panels, there are many more. The other pros deal largely with the survey tool itself as opposed to its distribution and high-level polling aspects.
The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative
While a research panel has several benefits and use cases, online survey tools present a stronger alternative. First off, they have even more use cases and can be applied to all with greater ease.
This is because the survey tool itself does all the recruiting and screening for you. As a researcher, marketer, or business owner, you don’t have to worry about whether your survey respondents fit your target survey audience’s qualifications.
Identifying and acquiring respondents are both taken care of by an online survey platform, that is if you choose a potent one. This means you don’t need to have a pre-study interview to vet potential participants. Instead, everything is automated.
A strong online survey platform offers machine learning and artificial intelligence software to run all of its functions and mechanisms. This means, there is little to no manual labor required on your part.
All you need to do in your survey campaign with a strong online survey tool is:
- Set your screener so that your survey targets the correct populations
- Create your questionnaire
- Analyze the survey
Those are the three steps involved in the Pollfish platform. If you’d like to learn how to make your own survey in just 3 easy steps, read the article in the hyperlink.
The online survey platform should handle all the rest. When it comes to running a high-quality market research campaign, there is a lot that goes into staving off poor-quality data and ensuring accurate results.
The following lays out what an AI-powered survey platform can do for your survey campaign:
What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for YOur Market Research Campaign
A lot is going on behind the scenes of an online survey platform. Luckily, you won’t have to worry about nearly all of them. Regardless, it is crucial to understand the depth of survey SaaS that runs on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Here’s what to expect from an AI-based survey platform:
- A strong adherence to targeting
- No respondent partially matches the demographic and psychographic screening that the researcher inputs into the platform.
- All survey participants must match 100% of the respondent qualifications. If not, they are disqualified from taking the survey, no matter how close to filling all slots of the criteria they get.
The Audience section on the organic sampling survey platform Pollfish has a rigid adherence to granular respondent targeting.
- Respondent verification
- This mechanism checks respondents for duplicated IDs to ensure each survey completed is done by a unique person, as opposed to one person taking a survey more than once.
- The platform checks IP and MAC addresses, Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers.
- In addition, the platform works with vetted publishers to send unique IDs as an added layer of protection against survey fraud.
- A layer of security in the questions themselves
- In-survey questions are designed as yet another layer of security against survey fraud.
- For example, a question can request respondents to answer a simple math problem.
- Or the survey would include identical questions with the response options re-ordered to verify answer consistency.
- Antibot Policy
- Bots are no match for an AI-powered platform that is designed to disqualify them from taking a survey.
- Zero tolerance for VPNs
- Most businesses and research campaigns put qualifications based on geographies.
- A respondent on a VPN would tarnish any study with filters on who gets to partake in the survey based on location.
- The Pollfish zero-tolerance approach to VPNs ensures the veracity of respondents’ location.
- Removal of incomplete surveys
- This speaks for itself, as surveys are meant to be fully completed. A partially complete survey would provide insufficient data.
- Incomplete surveys are especially problematic in surveys with follow-up questions to past questions, or those seeking more depth to a certain issue.
- Removal of surveys with suspicious activities
- Surveys with any questionable behaviors are rejected.
- This includes the removal of the following:
- Answering open-ended questions with nonsense
- Attempting to sign in from multiple countries/devices at once.
- Taking an inappropriate amount of time on the survey.
- Multiple layers of quality checks
- The survey platform uses a technical layer to perform other quality checks.
- This process includes our technical experts continuously working to avoid survey fraud.
- There are several layers that we use to maintain good data quality. These include checks on the following:
- Hasty answers Check: catches respondents who answer faster than the average time needed to read the questions.
- Reset ID Check: Activates when the respondent answered the same survey previously, but with a different device to avoid the same respondent from taking the survey more than once.
- Gibberish Check: Checks for answers contain nonsensical text. This is the kind of text without real words, such as “jnfjv vdf gre.”
Avoid receiving gibberish answers thanks to the Pollfish AI-powered survey platform
- Same IP Participation: Checks if a survey has been completed before within a certain time from the same IP address of the respondent’s device.
- Carrier Consistency: Assures that the carrier of the respondent’s internet service exists in the targeting market.
- Specialized questions to identify those not paying attention
- Aside from a layer of security in all questions, we offer specialized questions that detect poor data quality.
- These include the following question types:
- Red herring questions: Asks questions with odd answers to assure respondents are paying attention.
- Trap questions: Finds who is paying attention to a command, usually one that asks to select a negative response. Responders who choose positive responses will be caught.
- Quality Questions: Similar to red herring questions, they check if respondents read and understand what’s being asked.
- Constant iteration until all quotas are met
- With the agile research approach, the platform doesn’t merely provide speedy insights.
- Instead, it creates constant iterations until all the quotas and the desired amount of completed surveys are met.
- As such, the platform doesn’t cease, or pause (unless you set this command on your dashboard).
- It allows you to gain the proper amount for your sampling pool.
- With this, no survey pool is too large (relative to the necessary sampling size).
How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?
Respondents can rest assured that they do not need to give away their data. To add to this, they can still be incentivized to take part in a survey study.
An online survey platform does all the heavy lifting in terms of retrieving responses, while in a research panel, the researcher has to make sure that all the participants respond adequately. This is to say that the researchers themselves must check for gibberish answers, questions left unanswered and much more.
This is especially more difficult in focus groups and one-on-one interviews, in which a researcher has to make sure everyone participates in the former, and that the panelists are willing to truthfully answer all the questions in the latter.
An online survey tool also effectively eliminates the need to worry about survey response rates, as it keeps iterating until the preset requirements are met (including the number of respondents).
As such, researchers have plenty to gain for their research needs from using an online survey tool in tandem with a research panel, or even as a replacement for a research panel.
The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research
A research panel is a useful method for conducting market research, particularly for studying the same group of participants to monitor their opinions and behaviors and changes thereof.
However, a productive market research campaign will rely on using more diverse methods to extract data. This involves using random organic sampling, which forgoes the conditioning and pressures of a research panel.
As such, you should opt for a survey platform that offers RDE, or Random Device Engagement, which, as mentioned earlier on, distributes surveys randomly, across a wide network of digital properties. This includes websites, mobile sites and mobile apps.
With this survey function, the platform does all of the work when it comes to identifying respondents and covering all quotas. That means you don’t need to do anything in this regard, as the platform performs these tasks.
But there’s more.
To piggyback off of the section on the role of the research panel, online surveys and research panels do have some beneficial similarities. For example, they’re both ideal for creating and validating personas.
A research panel can identify a persona over several rounds of interviews/ surveys/ etc., while an online survey tool can conduct further research to find whether those personas are statistically significant.
Thus, these methods work well hand-in-hand when it comes to conducting market research. A strong online survey platform will ensure a synergistic relationship between random sampling surveys and research panels.
It should allow you to survey specific people, such as via email, or whichever digital channel you seek to use. Luckily, there’s the Distribution Link feature, which enables you to do just that.
Frequently asked questions
What is a research panel?
A market research panel includes participants who have willingly opted to participate in a research group regarding a specific subject. These members are pre-screened and pre-recruited.
Why are research panels important in the market research process?
Research panels are essential because they are not anonymous, unlike the respondents who take the surveys incognito. This is important because it allows researchers to find out everything about the members to match answers with the respondents themselves, ruling out chances of inaccuracy.
When should businesses use a research panel?
Businesses should set up a panel to facilitate in-depth research of audiences and their behavioral patterns or conduct a detailed, intimate study on customers. Large research projects that require multiple modes of data collection or market segmentation also work well with a dedicated research panel. You can also use them when building customer profiles.
What are some pros of using a research panel?
Panel members usually have a more advanced understanding of a research topic. Research panels are also easy to conduct in recurring intervals, and researchers do not need to screen information as they would with a new set of participants. In this way, it is faster and more efficient.
What are some cons of using a research panel?
With a panel, participants do not have privacy. They may have to participate in interviews which can be intimidating. This may pressurize a respondent to answer in a particular way, leading to an incorrect response. Research panels are also prone to fatigue, loss of interest, and panel attrition. Also, hiring a research panel is usually costlier as you may have to pay the participants for every session.
All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More
All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More
A survey panel also referred to as a panel survey, is a common research method used to gain insights from the same group of participants over a certain period.
This technique relies on examining research participants who join a market research study voluntarily. Aside from this, the participants are pre-recruited by researchers, to ensure they fit the respondent criteria they set for a particular research project.
This kind of research technique may appear to be a buzzword, given its prevalence in the market research space. However, whether it is useful and effective for your market research is entirely up to your research preferences and campaign needs.
Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand what a panel survey is before you can decide on whether you ought to implement it into your research strategy or not. Or, perhaps you want to use it in conjunction with another research method.
Either way, you should have a holistic view of everything this research method entails. This includes comparing it with random organic sampling and online surveys. Luckily, this guide provides all of this information and more.
This guide explores panel surveys, explaining them in full depth, along with their pros and cons, 5 examples of them and a comparative analysis of random sampling and survey panels.
Note: If you’re looking to do market research without the drawbacks of conducting panel surveys, try Pollfish. Our unique methodology guarantees authentic high-quality data, and it’s a fast and reliable way to survey targeted (yet randomized) people while they’re already engaged on their devices.
All About Panel Surveys: Table of Contents
- Defining Panel Surveys
- Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study
- Using Panelists in Your Target Market
- What to Study with a Panel Survey
- The Importance of Panel Surveys
- Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?
- Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys
- Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys
Defining Panel Surveys
Also called survey panels, panel surveys are a distinct form of market research that relies solely on panels to carry out the research study, as its name suggests.
Thus, it’s key to understand what the term “panel” means in the context of market research. A panel is a selection of participants who help researchers conduct market research by providing them with feedback on various studies.
The panelists do not join the study randomly, rather they are pre-recruited and pre-screened, based on the researcher’s panel needs and criteria.
A kind of research panel, a survey panel operates in the same way, except that it is strictly used within survey campaigns. As such, this panel is used for survey research alone, as opposed to other methods of panel usage.
Panels can be used in various research settings, including the following:
- One-on-one interviews
- Focus groups
- Survey studies
- All 6 main types of research, which include
- Exploratory research
- Correlational research
- Causal research
- Descriptive research
- Experimental research
- Explanatory research
- Field research
In the context of this guide, we’re going to focus on panels used in survey research alone. Hence, they are called survey panels, or panel surveys.
One of many market research techniques, this kind of research process uses a consistent group of participants, with the researchers returning to them repeatedly, either for a single survey campaign, which can require using multiple surveys or for multiple campaigns.
Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study
It is important to know that when referred to as a panel survey, this kind of research method is known as a longitudinal study. As such, this process is paired with longitudinal surveys.
This type of research study is often associated with correlational research.
As a type of longitudinal study, panel surveys involve correlational research because they examine the relationship between variables over an extended period. The period itself can vary.
As such, this kind of research method can be conducted in the following ways, occurring throughout:
- Weeks
- Months
- Years
- Decades
Regardless of the time dedicated to performing this research, it always involves the same survey target audience. By surveying the panelists at different points in time, researchers can glean a wide variety of changes and consistencies within their research subjects, aka the panelists.
Using Panelists in Your Target Market
While the panel remains the same, the topic(s) that can be scrutinized are virtually limitless.
For market research, the topics deal with a business’s target market. As such, all members of the panel survey must also have the qualities of those in your target market.
You can perform panel survey studies by zeroing in on your target market’s various market segments and customer personas. These are more distinct and defined groups of people who fall under your customer base.
This is the ideal way to conduct this kind of research and many others, as your target market can include a wide range of subgroups, whether they differ based on the following categories:
- Geographical locations
- Demographics
- This involves groupings based on gender, age, income level, ethnicity, employment type, education, etc.
- Psychographics
- This involves their attitudes, lifestyles, aspirations, values and other psychological criteria.
- It also involves whether they engage in a particular customer behavior.
- Firmographic
- This label is particular to studying a panel of business personnel, which you may do in B2B research.
- As such, it requires running B2B surveys.
Whichever categories you intend to group your panelists into, remember that they must fit into the qualities of your target market, as this group is the population of people most likely to purchase from your business.
What to Study with a Panel Survey
As aforementioned, you can explore a wide variety of topics in your panel survey. The following list enumerates some of these topics. Note that this is not a comprehensive list, as various other topics of concern may crop up, depending on your business, your customers and your research needs.
Here’s what this kind of research method allows you to study:
- Changing attitudes, opinions and sentiments
- Changes in customer buying behavior
- Changes in customer lifestyles
- Changes to consumer preferences
- Developments in your target market needs
- How your target market views your competitors
- The willingness of your customers to make repeat purchases
- Gaining a more in-depth glance at your market segments and customer personas
- Performing time-based research, such as longitudinal studies, retrospective studies and prospective studies
- Acquiring a snapshot of the present through cross-sectional studies
In this post, we’ll look at five-panel survey examples, which delve deeper into some of the topics on this list. But first, we’ll explain why this research method is important for researchers and their market research campaigns.
The Importance of Panel Surveys
Panel surveys are important for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons may hold more weight than others, depending on your research needs and preferences.
Firstly, these panels are ideal for longitudinal research, as the same group of participants agreed to partake in your study. You would make it known that they would be used in continuous studies.
Aside from facilitating longitudinal studies, panel surveys are also ideal for another time-based research campaign: retrospective studies. As such, these panels aid researchers in completing their retrospective surveys.
This kind of study is used to examine changes over a long period, except the survey itself is only administered once. That’s because retrospective studies invoke occurrences from the participants’ past, whether they are experiences, inclinations, feelings, or attitudes.
The study may ask participants to compare past phenomena with how they feel in the present. The purpose is to study historical data and compare it with the present.
Panel surveys are also necessary for prospective studies, which also can last for years and study changes and developments. However, unlike retrospective studies, they involve participants who do not have a certain outcome. Instead, prospective studies seek to study people before they develop a certain outcome, such as a disease or a new shopping habit.
Aside from enabling researchers to study changes, these panels also make it possible to conduct cross-sectional studies, which are different from the prior three kinds of research studies — longitudinal, retrospective and prospective studies. Nonetheless, cross-sectional studies are still one of the key survey research methods.
As opposed to studying survey subjects at multiple points in time, a cross-sectional study entails gathering research about a particular population at one fixed point in time. Because of this, this type of research method is often referred to as a snapshot of a studied population.
This kind of study is conducted by using cross-sectional surveys, which are designed specifically for the cross-sectional model and can be sent to your panelists. Although cross-sectional studies don’t require a panel survey, given that they focus on a single point in time instead of several to examine changes, they can still be administered via these panels.
That’s because you can recruit panels for virtually any study, whether it includes partaking in a survey, an in-person interview, field research, or a focus group. Thus, panel surveys are not limited to any form of study, making them multifunctional.
This grants plenty of convenience to researchers, especially those bogged down by various other tasks they have to uphold, instead of putting together a group of respondents.
Panel surveys are especially important, as they provide an ongoing sampling pool of participants, which researchers can turn to whenever they seek to conduct more research. This can be to jump-start a new research campaign or conduct further research for an ongoing campaign.
This constant access to a sampling pool can also assist researchers who initially thought they had enough data, only to later discover they need more information. After all, if the panelists have already opted in, there is no need to seek out participants any further.
Panel surveys are also useful due to the quality of the panelists. Although identifying and vetting panel members may take some time, the result is a quality survey panel, one that ticks off all the panelist criteria you have. With this, you can mitigate fraud and rest assured you’re studying the correct populations.
All in all, panel surveys are useful for a variety of market research campaigns and come with a good share of benefits, despite some of their shortcomings.
Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?
Now, let’s get to the heart of these panels, by going over what they can consist of, when, where, and how to use them.
The best way to explain the uses of a panel survey is by providing several panel survey examples. In this section, we’ll review five examples of when panel surveys can be used to good effect.
This will allow you to understand how panels work, along with some of their best-case scenarios for usage.
Example #1: Tracking Changes Over Time
Given that studying changes over time is the main purpose of leveraging a survey panel, it’s key to review this use case.
As such, one of the strongest examples of a panel survey is when researchers ask the same question(s) to a group of the same participants over a long period.
For example, if you were conducting a sociological experiment to understand if (or how) age correlates with wealth, you can set up a survey that studies panelists on the following:
- Income
- Expenses
- Assets
- Changes in employment
- Willingness to change jobs
- Willingness to switch job fields
A survey covering this topic ought to be conducted every two years, possibly spanning a decade (or more if need be).
That way, you can track changes relative to the scope of the issue you’re researching. Given that people typically stay at a job for about two years, it is key to follow up every two years on this research subject.
However, this has changed due to the Great Resignation, which saw the largest exodus of employees quitting their jobs in recent history.
The Great Resignation is not slowing down any time soon, with large numbers of people seeking better pay and benefits, along with the rise in job openings and remote work. This makes it much easier to switch jobs.
As such, the length of time you devote to tracking changes will depend on the circumstances of your study.
Alternatively, if you run a business, you’ll need to acquire ongoing insights into the market – and into audience behavior. For example, if your gym wear company wants to track the fitness habits of people over the year, a panel can be questioned every three months. You can run surveys with the same questions about how long people exercise, where they exercise, and how they do so.
For any business endeavor, you can implement the brand tracking survey, which allows you to track any changes that deal with your brand. This involves studying how your business is perceived, how in-demand its offerings are, what concerns your target market has that your business can address and much more.
Example #2: User Experience Research
Another common example of using a panel survey is for UX and UI design research. While UI refers specifically to designing web experiences, UX is far broader.
User experience can refer to a wide range of experiences that your customers encounter when interacting with a product, digital experience, or service. As such, it covers a wide range of aspects, all of which have some impact on how users experience your business’s offerings.
You can use these aspects as key considerations for driving your UX research. The following lists the four key components of user experience, which you should use in your research:
- Value: Does this experience give customers value?
- You can ask your panel whether a certain product, service, or digital experience provides them use and how so.
- It is key to study how your offerings can be made more valuable.
- Also, you should inquire about the products/services that your customers don’t find useful.
- Function: Does a product or product feature work?
- Ask your panel whether there are any bugs or glitches in how a product, feature, or service works.
- You can also study whether new needs arise in terms of your product’s functionalities.
- Usability: Is it easy to use?
- While your offerings may provide value, ask your customers whether they are easy to use, regularly.
- Study if your offerings can be made simpler over time.
- Also, look into whether customers seek other ways to access your offerings.
- For example: different devices, operating systems, web and app access
- General impression: Is it pleasant to use?
- Track changes to the overall sentiment towards your products, services and business at large.
- Ask your customers whether your offerings delight them or upset them.
- Ask customers to reveal anything else they’d like to see from your business to improve their UX.
When a company is building an app or a digital product, they want to gauge the customer experience as they go.
While usability testing (i.e. tracking how a person interacts with a specific feature), is often done using different methods, you can conduct qualitative research about design and experience by way of panel surveys.
The benefit of a panel survey here is that the participants remain constant – which removes a key variable.
Additionally, you can select panel participants based on their background or expertise, which will allow your pool to answer questions in a way that adds value to your product development process.
Example #3: Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction is central to keeping your business alive, whether you want to release new products or build a steady base of loyal customers. As such, you can use panels to keep a watchful eye on your customers' satisfaction with your business.
Doing so will allow you to increase your customer lifetime value, a metric that measures the total monetary value a customer will bring to a business during their relationship with the business throughout their lifetime.
If you want to gauge customer satisfaction and positive/negative sentiment over the lifetime of their interactions with your offering, use a select group of long-term customers and ask them questions periodically about your value proposition.

Use a customer satisfaction survey for this campaign, which can be framed to reveal hidden sentiments, or can be explicitly focused on asking how satisfied they are with what you offer.
For example, use the following questions/considerations to measure customer satisfaction:
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with [a product, service, experience]?
- A rating scale question
- What would you change about [a product, service, experience, or your company] if you could?
- Open-ended question
- How easy was it for you to [do something] with our product?
- Options include a scale of extremely easy to extremely difficult
- This is a Likert scale question,
- How would you rate your experience with our new [a product, service, experience]]?
- This can be a Likert scale.
- Or, it can involve multiple choices of varying answers.
In this panel survey example, the business would be able to track patterns of customer happiness over time – for example, to see whether features continue to add value months or years after the customer signs up. And you can incentivize participation with gifts, reduced subscription fees, or extra services.
Consider discussing the following topics with your panel:
- What are their overall thoughts about your business?
- How do they receive product updates? (Poorly, well, etc.)
- What kind of value does your business provide and where does it lack in value?
- What else can you do to delight your customers?
Example #4: Employee Engagement
Another crucial panel survey example deals with studying your human capital, aka, your employees. After all, it is the employees that allow your business to function daily.
As such, your business needs to track employee engagement and team morale. In essence, here, your staff are the members of the panel survey – and you might survey them every week, month, quarter, or year. In this case, you’re surveying the same people about issues that answer the following:
- Are employees engaged at work, or do they have low morale?
- Do employees enjoy their work?
- Are they meeting their goals?
- Do they understand the company's mission?
- Do they understand the company roadmap and high-level goals for the coming weeks and quarters?
- Are they happy with their compensation?
- Where can the company improve?
If this is the type of panel survey you’re looking for, there are plenty of surveys that are specialized for human resources and employee engagement purposes.
This includes the following surveys:
- The employee satisfaction survey
- Used specifically to measure satisfaction, this survey focuses on what customers like and dislike about their jobs and the company,
- The employee feedback survey
- This is a general survey that should handle high-level topics.
- The employee burnout survey
- This survey focuses on the negative aspects of employees’ jobs and your company.
- You can use it to avoid burnout by asking them what they’d like to see change in their employment, workflows, job processes, schedules, etc.
- The employee recognition survey
- This is conducted to measure and understand the degree of employee recognition within a business.
- It gauges the perception of recognition that employees feel they have from their managers, peers and the company at large.
- The eNPS survey
- This functions the same way as a Net Promoter Score survey but for employees.
- Employees are asked how likely they are to recommend their company to others, on a scale of 1-10.
- The employee retention survey
- This is used as an instrument to retain employees.
- It delves into the topics that business owners and HR workers need to understand, to forge ideal work environments and cater to the needs of their employees,
Example #5: Customer Loyalty
It takes years to build solid consumer loyalty, which is a must, given that it is the core of the aforementioned customer lifetime value. By retaining your customers, you’ll spend less on attempting to acquire new ones, have a steady pool of revenue and maintain a good brand reputation.
Your panel survey can help you keep track of your customer loyalty. As you gain their insights, you’ll discover how you can raise their loyalty to your brand. To do so, use a market research platform that offers a brand tracker.
This tool allows you to keep track of a variety of brand issues throughout the year and beyond. It enables you to uncover whether there are any shafts in your brand perception or reactions to your marketing campaigns.
Consider tracking the following on customer loyalty:
- What excites my target market about your offerings?
- What kind of brand news incites the most interest?
- Which segments of customers are most likely to make repeat purchases?
- Which customer groups are the most loyal to your brand?
- Which actions and offerings inspire loyalty to your brand?
Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys
Now, it’s time to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using panel surveys for your market research.
One of the primary advantages of a panel survey is that the participants learn to trust the researchers, and therefore may be open to deeper and more truthful answers.
In addition, this ongoing relationship can allow researchers to dig deeper with follow-up questions.
Another advantage is that with screening having occurred at the start of the research, all following surveys are quicker to carry out than starting from scratch.
However, the disadvantages of panel surveys include:
- Panel conditioning: When you’re surveying the same people repeatedly, previous surveys might influence their responses and/or behavior. For example, if they know a certain question triggers a longer process, they may choose an answer that offers the path of least resistance. Or if you’re asking about a particular activity, like eating donuts, they may eat less (or more) thereafter.
Note: Furthermore, panel surveys don’t tend to occur within a “natural” setting, and therefore the artificial environment might affect thought processes and responses to questions. - Panel fatigue: If a person feels like a pay-off for participating in a panel survey is no longer worth the effort, the quality of their response may drop. This leads to incomplete or poor-quality survey responses, and survey “straight-lining” – i.e. answering the same to every question.
- Declining participation: Over time, inevitably, participants will drop out of the process – either due to panel fatigue, or other reasons. This will damage the quality and depth of your data.
And with survey panels, you run the risk of accidentally signing up “professional” panelists – especially when there are cash-based incentives on offer. Though screening should be designed to pick up these people before they enter the process, they’re adept at slipping through the net.
Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys
With increased pressure on people’s time, survey response rates have been decreasing. It’s harder than ever to guarantee consistent high-quality data, and as conventional survey companies scramble to include as many willing participants as possible, the quality reduces yet further.
At Pollfish, we don’t use conventional panels. Our unique methodology, called Random Device Engagement (RDE) uses the organic sampling approach for finding and procuring survey participants.
A kind of organic probability sampling, RDE polling relies on advertising networks and other device portals to engage potential respondents wherever they are voluntarily. This includes a variety of digital platforms and properties, such as:
- Mobile sites
- Apps
- Website
- Mobile games
All respondents gathered via the RDE method have no biases, as they are not pre-recruited and therefore face less pressure to answer things in a certain way. Due to this, they are less subject to a wide host of survey biases.
This includes the following survey biases:
- Sampling bias: This bias occurs when the respondent selection process, specifically when a survey sample is not chosen at random.
- This leads to under or overrepresentation of a certain segment of your survey target population, as only certain types of respondents are going to partake, while others aren’t.
- Acquiesce bias: Also called agreement bias, this occurs when respondents gravitate towards positive or agreeable answers.
- In this bias, respondents feel more social pressure to answer in a particular way, as their identities are known in panel surveys.
Organic sampling and Random Device Engagement obliterate these two (and other) biases. That’s because this process is completely randomized, stamping out sampling bias. Not only does it reach people randomly, but on Pollfish, this method is paired with our state-of-the-art survey platform.
Our online survey platform reaches specific populations based on demographics, psychographics and specific screening questions you can input. This ensures you’ll reach all the required target audiences to partake in your study.

Aside from reaching respondents organically and randomly, the respondents are completely anonymous. They don’t need to provide their names, contact information, or any identification to take a survey. Instead, they are simply reached and opted in.
They may also have the option of gaining survey incentives. This eliminates virtually all forms of acquiescence bias, as there is no pressure to provide certain answers over others.
Each screened participant has a unique ID, which prevents them from taking the same survey more than once, weeding out bias and survey fraud.
When working with Pollfish, you don’t need to use conventional panels – which are slow and subject to conditioning, fatigue, and declining participation. Instead, get authentic insights from our pool of over 250 million people (and growing) – who are already engaged on their devices and ready to participate.
As such, organic sampling, coupled with a potent online survey platform like Pollfish, provides a better market research option over panel surveys.
A panel survey is a type of survey method that involves repeated interviews of a group of people over a specific period of time. A longitudinal study is another term used to describe panel survey. It refers to any study that examines the same group of people over a period of time. Panel participants often learn to trust the researcher and may reveal deeper, most honest insights. This type of survey is also a good way to track progress or evolution over time. Panel fatigue occurs when the participant no longer feels that the reward for participating in the panel is worth it. If panel fatigue occurs, the participant may not give deep answers, but instead try to answer the questions as quickly as possible. When interviewing the same people repeatedly, the answers to previous surveys may influence their behavior by causing them to reflect on activities that they previously gave little thought to. This influence is known as panel conditioning.Frequently asked questions
What is a panel survey?
What is a longitudinal study?
What are the benefits of panel surveys?
What is panel fatigue?
How can panel surveys influence participant behavior?
All About Panel Surveys: Using this Method for Market Research
All About Panel Surveys: Using this Method for Market Research
Panel surveys (not to be confused with survey panels) are used in survey research as part of longitudinal studies. The purpose of this kind of study is to reap continual observations on different variables on the same sample pool over a period of time.
The variables include consumer feelings, attitudes and opinions regarding a number of matters. As such, the surveys are conducted across the same sample pool, i.e., the survey panel.
This way, the opinions of the same panelists can be monitored, as opposed to bringing in new respondents (even if they are part of the same target market). Panel surveys are conducted in waves (sequences of surveys) to measure changes in consumer thoughts and behaviors.
There are many key aspects of panel surveys; this article will cover all of them to help you decide on whether your business needs to use the panel survey method.
How Panel Surveys are Conducted
First off, panel surveys are but one type of longitudinal studies, which also include retrospective studies and record linkages.
As their name indicates, panel surveys use surveying as the data collection method. This data is mainly collected through the aforementioned survey panels, a method in which a pre-recruited pool of respondents agreed to take part in your survey.
However, panel surveys can also be collected through other online survey methods, mainly DIY survey platforms. These allow you to target a specific set of respondents, but unlike survey panels, they are not conducted among the same exact group of individuals. (More on this below).
Since panel surveys are longitudinal, this sampling pool stays the same and is used for repeated studies and observations.
Panel surveys are part of panel research and can take the form of either qualitative or quantitative studies for measuring consumer behavior.
The Pros of Panel Surveys
It’s worth considering several of the advantages that panel surveys carry when considering this surveying method. You ought to then weigh them against the disadvantages to determine if this is the correct survey route for your market research needs.
- Easy Collection of the Sampling Pool: Whether you intend to use an online survey platform or a survey panel, panel surveys make it easy to use a qualified sampling pool. That is because there is no need to look for respondents on an individual basis; instead, you either opt for recruited participants, or the online survey platform you use prescreens respondents for qualification.
- Longitudinal Benefits: As it follows the longitudinal survey method, panel surveys allow you to truly access the psyche of your target market. This is because consumers and the general public can change their minds — some more regularly than others. By conducting this survey research, you can stay up to date with any and all changes in attitude, thoughts and behaviors your target market undergoes.
- Speed to Insights: Online survey tools allow you to quickly garner all the respondents that match your screening requirements and demographics selections. A survey panel entails that respondents have already opted into the survey. In any case, getting results will be quick.
- Optimized Design: Whether you use an online survey panel or organic random sampling via a survey platform, each allows you to create customized questionnaires. The degree of this will change from one survey platform to the next, but the convenience of optimizing your survey to your favor is still present.
- Affordability: Panel surveys are relatively affordable. With online survey panels, you should be wise about how you incentivize your panel — this can be done by paying the panelists small amounts per each survey they take, or a larger sum for a set amount of surveys. A decent online survey tool should include several payment plans, with at least one perfect for your budget.
The Cons of Panel Surveys
While an invaluable form of primary research, panel surveys are not without setbacks. Here are a few of the disadvantages these surveys harbor. Some may appear minor, while others are more considerable.
- Panel Fatigue: Predominantly found in survey panels, this occurrence refers to the reduction of interest among the panelist(s) when they take part in too many survey waves. This breeds full-fledged boredom and exhaustion, leading to a decline in the quality of data. In this case, panelists may take part in flat-lining or other inaccurate answer tactics. There are 5 types of survey respondents like these to look out for.
- Limited Internet Traffic: A problem principally found in online survey tools, as they are under the heel of the publisher sites and apps that deploy the surveys. There may not be enough qualifying respondents in one site or app, depending on who visits it during survey distribution.
- Survey Attrition: Piggybacking off of panel fatigue as the most severe case of it, survey attrition alludes to the dropping out of a panel. Panelists may experience a negative UX with the panel, thereby attriting at any wave of the study. These respondents are especially difficult to replace in survey panels, as they’ve already provided some crucial data, so there will be a void when it comes to conducting further surveys based on their responses. Some panelists do not drop out permanently, as they may return to the panel at some later time. With online surveys, this is relatively non-existent, as new responders are screened in each survey wave.
- Inclination towards Bias: Particular to survey panels, this occurs when panel respondents have taken too many surveys, thus becoming programmed to the way your surveys are set up. As such, they become less like genuine research subjects and more like trained survey-taking professionals. They may not put forth too much effort or thought into further survey waves because of this; rather they will clamber to get out of a survey as soon as possible.
- Respondent Identity Fraud: Especially common in online survey tools where you cannot validate the identity of your sampling pool, this can lead to respondent fraud. Respondents may lie about their age, employment and any other type of demographic identifier. Your data will suffer as a result. Survey panels may be immune to this if you choose your panel via face-to-face interviews, or if you know any member of the panel.
- Panel Fatigue: Predominantly found in survey panels, this occurrence refers to the reduction of interest among the panelist(s) when they take part in too many survey waves. This breeds full-fledged boredom and exhaustion, leading to a decline in the quality of data. In this case, panelists may take part in flat-lining or other inaccurate answer tactics. There are 5 types of survey respondents like these to look out for.
Panel Surveys: Uses and Applications
Panel surveys have various applications that you can put to use for your brand. Whether you’re looking to innovate an existing product, develop a new one, understand how your target market responds to current affairs, how they respond to certain communications or virtually anything else you need data for, panel surveys are useful ind=struments to leverage.
Here are several specific uses and applications for these kinds of surveys.
- Detect common customer behaviors in relation to purchasing, clicking on an ad, or interacting with your brand in any other way (digital or physical).
- Analyze the costs of a product, service or subscription.
- Predict sales for particular campaigns and seasons.
- Understand how to use current affairs in brand messaging (including the knowledge of which subjects and rhetoric may be too sensitive for your target market).
- Monitor trends in how customers buy from brands.
- Find how recent and distant events have affected the attitude and opinions of your target market.
- Segmenting your target market.
Marrying Survey Panels and Organic Sampling
Closing off, it is crucial to reiterate that one of the key differentiators of panel surveys is their ability to incorporate two different types of survey respondent collection methods: survey panels and organic sampling (in online survey tools).
These fall into diametric opposition with one another, as the former involves recruiting willing survey respondents (the panel), while the latter uses organic sampling, in which respondents opt into a survey in real-time when they discover it in a website or app.
Although survey panels are the chief method to conduct panel surveys, due to the repeated nature of observation, both of these survey methods have the ability to sustain the longitudinal study method of panel surveys.
Survey panels are the primary collection method of responses, as panel surveys and other longitudinal studies involve studying the same group of respondents.
Survey panels do just that. However, survey tools that use organic sampling, can also study the same group based on their demographics and conditioned screening questions. The only difference is that the responders in organic sampling won’t be the exact same people, but rather those who fit the categories.
Either way these two methods can both be applied or even used hand in hand. We suggest using a robust online software tool that provides a wide range of features to optimize your survey research.
Frequently asked questions
What is a panel survey?
A panel survey is a type of longitudinal study that follows the behavior of a predetermined group of people over a period of time. In a panel survey, data is gathered through a series of surveys conducted at set intervals.
What is a longitudinal study?
A longitudinal study is a form of research that makes observations and gathers data over a period of time, rather than at one single point in time.
What variables are examined in a panel survey?
Panel surveys tend to track feelings, attitudes, and opinions to understand how they change over time or in response to certain stimuli.
What are some of the benefits of using an online survey panel?
Online survey panels are cost-effective, can be distributed quickly, allow for easy data compilation to discover insights and offer an optimized design to improve response rate.
What is panel fatigue?
Panel fatigue is a phenomenon that occurs when a survey panelist participates in too many surveys and then becomes tired or bored with the survey process. This can lead to inaccuracies in survey data.
How to Get Insight from Consumer Panel Surveys: 10 Tips
How to Get Insight from Consumer Panel Surveys: 10 Tips
Alongside focus groups and ad-hoc questionnaires, consumer panel surveys are a popular tool for businesses looking to gain insight into what their audiences – and consumers at large – are thinking.
Using pre-recruited and pre-screened groups (or panels) of respondents, consumer panel surveys have specific advantages over alternative consumer research methods. You can control your audience, for example, and return to the panel over time to collect data repeatedly from the same set of people. This lets you dig deep into highly targeted audiences – and, crucially, compare changes in attitude over time.
Yet, as with all research methods, to get real value from consumer panel surveys, you need to refine your technique. That’s why, in this article, we’re sharing 10 tips and best practices to get the most from your consumer panel surveys. We’re talking how to shrewdly recruit and screen respondents, how to ask questions that elicit authentic opinion, and how to use the right analytical methods to yield deep insight.
Note: Don’t forget, Pollfish has created a new consumer research methodology that works a little differently. One that fulfills the promise of consumer panel surveys, while keeping bad data to a minimum – and making access to deep insights easier and more efficient.
Where to Start with Consumer Panel Surveys?
Consumer research can deliver highly valuable insight for your business. Whether you want to test how an ad campaign will land, or get feedback on a new product line, opinion from authentic consumers – and potential customers – can be priceless.
Yet, you can’t just go and fire questions around at random. This won’t tell you anything of value. Rather, thinking through who you are asking and why is crucial before you start.
Here are three tips on how to get that done.
#1: Gain Clarity on Your Research Problem and Goal
We’re starting with the basics, yes. But a true understanding of what you want from your research is an essential element that too often goes overlooked, particularly by businesses conducting research themselves. If you want insights that have value for you, you need absolute clarity on your larger goals.
Do you want to boost sales, refine a specific product, or determine brand positioning? A robust research objective will help you sculpt questions that deliver sharper insights – and save you time asking questions that don’t deliver value.
#2: Refine Your Research’s Scope and Scale
Once armed with a research objective, you now need to assess the desired scale of your research. This can get a little complex – but it ultimately shapes the reliability of your research.
Of course, the ideal survey would consult 100% of your target population – whether that’s marketing graduates in Scotland or cyclists among your company staff. While this scale would yield data on which you can surely rely, this is usually not possible in practice. Even if your target population is very small.
However, the further from 100% of the population, the greater the likelihood of inaccuracy. What you need to decide as a business is what margin of error you can tolerate. If you are making high-stakes decisions, you want data you can trust – and the larger the sample size the better.
#3 Source and Speak to the Right People
For authentic insights that deliver value for you, speak to the right audience. You can’t take this for granted. Before you conduct any survey, you need to recruit respondents that suit your target demographic.
This is what screening questions are for. These filter out respondents who aren’t right for you. However, as our resident expert, Jim Theodoropoulos, notes, using screening questions can be difficult to get right. These need to be combined with demographic targeting to narrow in on your audience.
Using Pollfish, for example, if you are seeking mothers who are runners, you can use the “gender” and “number of children” filters, before asking a screening question about preferred exercise. Like this, you can access deeper insights into specific audiences – and keep the professional panelists to a minimum.
Asking Questions that Deliver Real Value
The way you ask questions – and the form in which you receive answers – affects the quality of your data. And avoiding bias and panel fatigue, for example, can make conducting consumer panel surveys a bit of a minefield.
This is why many businesses use options like Pollfish to help design the questions. But if you’re going it alone, below are some tips on how to ask good survey questions and get answers you can trust.
Note: For more on this, check out our article on how to ask good survey questions.
#4 Ensure Neutrality
Bias is a bad look in consumer research. For surveys to yield data that is actually valuable, they need to tap into the authentic opinion of respondents. Not reflect the prejudices of the researchers.
That means avoiding leading questions, those questions that direct respondents to specific answers. For example, “How would you rate our award-winning customer service?” has the potential to skew responses by including the qualifier “award-winning”.
However, even “what problems do you see in our customer service?” distorts the insights you will receive – as it assumes problems, whereas none may have been seen by the respondent.
This also means providing multiple-choice responses that reflect the range of opinion. If “how would you rate our customer service?” is your neutral question, the possible responses need to achieve similar neutrality. “Extremely helpful / Helpful / Neither helpful or unhelpful / Unhelpful / Extremely unhelpful”, for example, keeps the balance between positive and negative options while keeping framing consistent.
#5 Use Strategies to Mitigate Panel Fatigue
During surveys, and particularly during panel surveys, it’s not unlikely that respondents will become bored or disengaged – even though they sign up to participate.
When respondents are asked too many questions, we call this panel fatigue. It’s one of the biggest downsides to consumer panel surveys. Respondents might lean on “don’t know” or they might start “straightlining” – where they choose the same response for every question.
To avoid this, change up your question formats and shuffle questions around. It boosts engagement. It ensures more trustworthy responses. And it ups your completion rate – making data more reliable overall.
#6 Be Specific – and Remember Your Research Goal
Every question in your survey should provide an insight into your audience’s opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Those that are irrelevant or too vague are not going to deliver the insights you need to make effective business decisions.
In this way, if you are a gaming app, an open question like “what do you like to do in your downtime?” is not focused enough – and it doesn’t direct respondents’ thoughts to gaming. As such, it won’t provide data that will be of use to your research goal.
Understanding Insights from Consumer Panel Research
You’ve asked the questions. Now, you need to understand the responses.
This will first mean collating recurring answers, identifying patterns, and highlighting anomalies – a process that can be hugely time-consuming if you are doing it alone. That’s why Pollfish, by the way, delivers automated analytics in real-time. More on that later.
Once you’ve arranged the data, you need to analyze it. Here’s how to get started.
#7 Compare Your Data to Larger Trends
Numbers, let’s remember, are all relative. And getting valuable insights from them is difficult when they are viewed in isolation.
Your survey tells you 80% of respondents said that they were happy with your customer service. But for this to be valuable to you, this needs to be put in context. How does this compare, for example, to other businesses of your size in your industry? Or to your results from last year?
Larger trends are your friends – and they help make sense of your customer panel survey. If this is your first survey of its kind, let these results be the benchmark from which you understand future developments. If you have numbers from previous surveys, use these to assess your progress.
#8 Cross-Tabulate – and Dig Deep
Similarly, when you are reading your results, the big picture isn’t always the most useful view.
Say that 65% of respondents in a general population survey said they found your new ad campaign funny or very funny. That might feel like a win. However, these numbers could be disguising insights of more specific value.
That’s what cross-tabulation is about. Using crosstabs can let you see how different data fields overlap – and this is an indispensable tool for analyzing your data. For example, maybe the ad landed much less effectively with women. Or the joke was completely lost on 21-30-year olds.
This matters. There may be an insight you need to address. You just need to dig deeper to find it.
#9 Keep on Researching
In a world in which business competition is sharp, a single survey won’t do. As a result, there’s one tip that needs to be stressed: keep returning to your audience to do more research.
The unique value of consumer panel research is that going back and asking questions is easy. Your panelists are there, pre-recruited, ready, and willing to respond. Make use of them. There is really no such thing as too much data.
#10 Use Pollfish to Make Deeper Insights Easier
At Pollfish, we’ve moved beyond the traditional consumer panel survey. We’ve developed a research methodology that makes gathering insights into consumer opinion easier. It makes recruiting panelists and understanding insights faster, more cost-effective, and less labor-intensive, too.
For example, our consumer research platform sources insights from over half a billion engaged consumers, connected via our network of 120,000 app providers. We screen every participant based on pre-collected demographic, biographic, and behavioral data – as well as your screening questions – to take the stress out of finding the right audience.
Pollfish makes setting research objectives and framing questions easier too. We give you some of the most common research goals and pre-crafted question templates to choose from. To keep bias to a minimum and ensure participant engagement, all you have to do is select.
Finally, analyzing data is easier with Pollfish, too. Our advanced data tools let you filter your findings in real-time. All admin is taken care of, so that you can dedicate yourself to visualizing your insights – and ultimately putting them to work.
Frequently asked questions
What is a consumer panel survey?
A consumer panel survey is a type of survey that is conducted at set intervals over a period of time with the same group of respondents. The time period can range from days to years.
Why are consumer panel surveys used?
With interviews conducted over a period of time, consumer panel surveys are ideal for understanding how the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of people evolve over time.
What are the benefits of conducting a consumer panel survey?
One of the primary benefits of consumer panel surveys is that they can be used to gain deep insights about a highly targeted audience. In addition, individual surveys are easy to deploy because the respondents have already been identified.
How are screening questions used?
Screening questions are used to identify the appropriate audience or panel for a survey. Combined with demographic targeting, these questions can help identify the best audience for a survey.
What is panel fatigue?
Panel fatigue occurs when survey respondents become bored or disengaged from the survey process, resulting in mediocre or inaccurate data.
Online Survey Panels: How to Access Deep Insights Efficiently
Online Survey Panels: How to Access Deep Insights Efficiently
When it comes to gathering data on consumer attitudes and opinions, there are a number of options available to businesses. You can go out into the world with a pencil and paper and ask questions directly to the public. You can organize a focus group for detailed, highly targeted responses.
Or you can try online survey panels.
Online survey panels can offer deep and efficient access to what your potential audiences are thinking. Yet, they have been known to sometimes be tarnished by poor data. Panelists get over-surveyed, for example, and stop providing authentic responses. Or they’re just in it for the compensation – and so speed through questions without giving them enough attention.
Yet, this isn’t always the case. In fact, new methods of conducting consumer research are taking steps beyond traditional online survey panels.
In this article, we’ll share what we at Pollfish are doing to ensure that you can gain deep, authentic insights from your consumers – in ways that are truly efficient in terms of cost and time. But first, what exactly is an online survey panel? And why would you use one in the first place?
What is an Online Survey Panel?
Survey panels are a research method in which data is collected from a group of pre-recruited and pre-screened respondents who have agreed to complete your survey. In a nutshell, that’s it.
That said, survey panels are often used for a more specific purpose – namely, to collect data repeatedly from the same set of people. In this way, a group of panelists responds to surveys in a number of research sessions over a given period stretching from weeks up to a year. This gives panel surveys some specific advantages over ad-hoc, one-off questionnaires, for example.
Meanwhile, while a focus group has only a handful of participants, from whom researchers can take very detailed data, survey panels use a much larger sample size – well into the hundreds and thousands. This way, they can give businesses access to a much broader section of the population, or provide deep insight into highly targeted demographics.
And whether you want to test a product, or see how audiences respond to an ad campaign, this knowledge of your consumers is indispensable.
What Insights Can You Gain from an Online Consumer Research Panel?
There are a number of reasons why you choose to conduct an online survey panel over other forms of data collection. Fundamentally, though, businesses tend to opt for panels for the specific kinds of insights that they provide.
In-Depth Data from Targeted Audiences
What survey panels offer better than most other methods of research is a targeted audience at scale. Participants in online research panels are profiled and screened – meaning that you can be sure that the panelists to whom you are asking the questions truly reflect your desired audience.
We don’t just mean this in terms of demographics, age, or gender. Pre-screening questions allow for targeted research in very narrow consumer segments. You may not just want to see how a product or ad will go down with the general population. You might be interested in how it will go down with men in the north of England who like jazz music and drink craft beer. Obviously, this is a little more specific.
Opinion Analysis over Time
By returning to the same group of respondents, online survey panels can provide data on changing opinion through time, within your identified audience. This lets you analyze trends within your target demographic, or within those with a certain behavior, to understand how your audience develops.
This continuous approach can offer powerful insights – and it can set up a great baseline to which you can compare one-off survey data too.
A Broader Selection of Data
Ad-hoc surveys provide limited snapshots of consumer opinion. Online panel surveys rather provide a much richer field of data. Alongside the simple responses to the surveys themselves, the initial screening questions, demographic information, and longitudinal data promise a much more comprehensive profile of your audience. And this can better inform key business decisions.
How Online Panel Surveys Can Boost Business Efficiency
Consumer panel surveys offer businesses with authentic, in-depth insights into their audiences. Yet, importantly, they do this at a relatively low cost – while offering quick, efficient results. It’s the combination of these factors that make them one of the most popular research methods.
Here are some of the efficiencies you can expect from online panels.
Repeat Participants Reduce Processing and Costs
With online survey panels, respondents opt-in and provide information about themselves in the process. This keeps start-up costs and time expenditure low. If you had to prepare screening questions and find your specific target audience for every survey you wanted to ask, your work would be never-ending.
The good thing about panels is that once set up, the panel remains there, pre-recruited and pre-profiled. This means that you can move fast whenever you have a question to ask. Changes to your brand can be tested quickly – allowing you to move forward on them in a more favorable timescale.
Quality Respondents Available at an Instant
Similarly, as participants sign up for the panel, you can be much more sure that they are willing to participate in your research. This gives you more data faster – as it tends to boost response rates, while keeping participants free from bots.
All that needs to be ensured is that the quality of the panel remains high. Yet, this saves serious energy and money in comparison is starting from scratch every time.
Efficient, Automated Data Collection and Analysis
Traditional panels are one thing; online survey panels are quite another. Modern technologies have powered efficiencies not only in the ways that you ask questions but in the ways that you understand the answers too.
This inevitably makes the analysis of patterns in data easier and more sophisticated. And it cuts down on the costs associated with labor time. In some cases, insights can be delivered in real-time as they come in.
Yet, There’s a Problem with Online Survey Panels
Consumer research always has its imperfections. And this is also true for online survey panels. No matter how efficient they may be, there are issues that have plagued this research method since its inception – and are no less significant since the move online.
Panel fatigue. A common issue, panel fatigue happens when respondents are over-surveyed. While they may sign up in good faith, participants can simply become bored. As a result, they rush through or skip questions, or lean heavily on the ‘don’t know’ option – which is not very helpful for your data.
Professional panelists. Panel participation has often been encouraged through cash-based incentives. But “professional panelists” – respondents who complete as many surveys as possible, to maximize their compensation – have proliferated as a result. These favour speed over quality answers – and are known to manipulate screening questions to ensure access to as many surveys as possible. Again, this affects the data.
Non-organic environment. A fundamental challenge for the accuracy of survey panels is that data collection does not occur within a consumer’s natural setting. Survey environments tend to be artificial, and this affects participants’ thought processes – meaning that quality, authentic data is not guaranteed.
What Pollfish Does Better with Online Surveys
At Pollfish, we’ve moved away from simple online research panels due to exactly these problems. And our consumer research methodology tackles these issues head-on – while assuring cost-effective and efficient insights for your business.
Our access to over half a billion engaged consumers makes this possible. These come through our network of 120,000+ app providers, which deliver surveys to their users in-app in exchange for specific, in-app incentives. This draws a line under professional panelists, who cannot accumulate rewards while assuring that surveys are completed by engaged participants in their organic environment.
Part of our method means that we also remove 30% of our responses. Why? With so many reasons why poor data accumulates – from professionals to fatigued panelists, to bots and fraudsters – we’ve implemented radical measures to ensure that quality remains high. This means that you get more authentic consumer insights and that every data point you receive is more reliable – and better value for your money, too.
Finally, our platform does all the screening. We have pre-collected data on participant demographics, and even mobile usage – so that you don’t have to spend the time doing this yourself. As a result, all you have to do is ask the questions.
How You Can Access Consumer Insights Efficiently with Pollfish
We make it easier to gain deep consumer insights. With the largest audience in the world, living in over 160 countries, we use a rolling profiling model to ensure that the data we hold is always up to date. This keeps your work to a minimum.
- Define your audience demographics. Tell us who your audience is based on age, gender, education, and more. Then focus the specific consumer segment using our predefined criteria – on behavioral attributes, psychographics, and other biographic information.
- Refine your target with screening questions. These get you even closer to the audience you want. For example, you may want to include only those who are aware of certain events or who hold certain opinions.
- Select from question types and research objectives. We have collected common research objectives and pre-crafted question types so that all you have to do is select.
- Analyze data with ease. Our advanced data tools allow you to filter your findings even further, by location or employment status. Survey results are available to you in real-time too, so you don’t need to wait for all the data to come in.
At Pollfish, we’ve gone beyond simple online survey panels, to make accessing customers insights even more efficient – and less prone to bad data. We do the heavy lifting so that you can dedicate your energies to putting your consumer insights to work.
Frequently asked questions
What is a survey panel?
A type of research method, survey panels are used to collect data from a sample of individuals who have agreed to complete the panel survey. In most cases, survey panels are performed over a period of time to collect data from participants several times.
What type of insights are survey panels used for?
Survey panels are particularly useful for providing insightful data from a targeted audience, understanding how opinions change over time, and providing a more comprehensive view of the target audience.
What are the benefits of survey panels?
A main benefit of survey panels is that you already have an established, pre-qualified group of respondents available to answer your questions. This results in a more cost-effective process and allows business owners to collect information quickly when needed.
What are the disadvantages of survey panels?
Survey panels are subject to some flaws, including panel fatigue and panel conditioning. Both of these occur when the respondents alter their survey responses or change their behavior as a result of their participation in the panel.
How can “professional panelists” affect the results of a survey?
Professional panelists are motivated to join the survey panel to gain the reward that is offered. These individuals may participate in as many surveys as possible, resulting in much lower quality responses.