Getting results, and paying out the ass for it!

October 7, 2009 3:26 PM

I need to conduct a survey, but I need the traffic to send to it.

Are there any services out there (reasonably priced; they need not be free) that will host polls and provide traffic to those polls? I remember seeing ads on Facebook with polls, but can find nowhere to set one up. I'd like to also be able to limit the exposure by demographic (my "product" is pretty age-specific).

Any idea, hivemind?

posted by chrisfromthelc to technology (5 comments total)

Survey Monkey is a great tool for survey creation, collection and analysis, but they will not drive traffic to your poll. I'm not aware of any service that does both, although I'm sure something exists!

I'd think the best method (depending on what you want to do), is to create the survey in one place so that all of the data is in the same place, and then drive traffic to that survey from separate avenues. That's how I'd do it at least, in order to ensure that I don't have duplicates and that my data is as reliable as possible.

I'm not sure what your budget is, but you might also contact a research facility, they might have a reasonably priced solution that wouldn't be much more than purchasing ads on major websites and might be more cost effective in the long run.
posted by pazazygeek at 3:43 PM on October 7

PureProfile you set up your survey and set the criteria for who you want to participate (country = USA, sex = female, age less than 75 etc), they send out invites to members who match your profile.

Not sure how much they charge.
posted by trialex at 3:50 PM on October 7

Yes, you can purchase survey samples from research vendors. What you are looking for is online panels. The Green Book is a directory of these panels. Essentially, they are databases of people who have opted in to receive surveys and may be compensated, accrue rewards points or be entered into a drawing for a prize.

I have used Zoomerang in the past to host the survey, while the sample has been provided by MarketTools (for a fee).

Most samples are priced by incidence level - how often they occur in the general online population. Therefore, if you are targeting 18-24 year olds, your sample will likely cost less than if you were targeting adults 65+ with HHI $250K+. Also, by purchasing a sample, you can request a quota - i.e. 100 people within your demographic to complete the survey.

I would not recommend spending a lot of money "driving traffic" because you must still rely on click-through rates which tend to be quite low for unsolicited surveys.
posted by Andy's Gross Wart at 3:56 PM on October 7

Just a suggestion on traffic driving...

I did a pretty technical b2b product research survey and it targeted a really niche audience. You can rent lists of very targeted selects and send an email blast to them and get some decent response as long as you dangle a nice carrot for them like a $5 Starbucks card or something more expensive depending on how high up they are.
posted by Elminster24 at 10:32 PM on October 7

Amazon Mechanical Turk
posted by VC Drake at 11:28 AM on October 9