Panel Integration

Overview

With panel integration you can distribute your survey through a panel company in order to gather a desired number of responses from people that fit certain demographic criteria. Panel companies typically provide 3 URLs for the survey to redirect to depending on the category respondents fall into:

  1. Complete and Redirect to Website
  2. Disqualified and Redirect to Website
  3. Quota Full and Redirect to Website

Panel Integration with SurveyMethods

Let’s say you want to target male consumers between the age of 30 and 50 to provide feedback on their smartphones.

To get the required respondents:

  1. Contract with a panel company that has a database of the types of respondents you are looking to survey.
  2. Create a survey using SurveyMethods with the questions you want to ask respondents. At the beginning of your survey you may ask the qualifying questions (What is your gender? Which age group do you belong to? Do you own a smartphone?).
  3. Your panel company will provide you with the URLs for the following categories of respondents:
    1. Complete (respondents that qualify and complete the survey)
    2. Disqualified
    3. Quota Full
  4. Here are examples of the URLs:
    1. https://mypanelcompany.com/complete?responseid=RID112&projectid=PID210
    2. https://mypanelcompany.com/disqualified?responseid=RID113&projectid=PID210
    3. https://mypanelcompany.com/quota full?responseid=RID114&projectid=PID210
  5. Launch the survey and provide the survey web URL to the panel company with instructions on how to append custom fields. Custom fields are attached to the survey web URL and are primarily needed to uniquely identify the responses.
  6. The panel company will append the appropriate custom fields to the survey web URL and distribute the survey.

Note: If only a single response is needed from each panelist, the “Single Take Per Unique Value” setting will have to be checked in the survey settings. This feature restricts the survey to be taken only once for each Web Custom Field 1 value. The panel company will have to be instructed to append the unique identifier to the survey web URL as the first custom field.

How to Set Up Redirect URLs

You’ll need to set up the redirections based on responses to the screening questions and the quota(s). The redirections have to be to the URLs provided by the panel company. As mentioned above, your panel company will provide you with the redirect URLs for the following categories of respondents:

  • Complete: Respondents that qualify and complete the survey will be redirected to the “Complete” URL so the panel company can identify respondents that completed the survey.
  • Disqualified: Respondents that do not match your criteria will be redirected to the URL for “Disqualified” respondents.
  • Quota Full: Respondents that attempt to take your survey after the quota has been reached will be redirected to the “Quota Full” URL.

Setting Up Redirect URLs for Disqualified Respondents

In this example, we want male respondents aged 30-50 to provide feedback on iPhones. Respondents that meet these conditions should be redirected to the “iPhone Feedback” page, while respondents that don’t meet these conditions will be redirected to the “Disqualified URL”. The first page of our survey will have the qualifying question, gender, age, and whether or not the respondent has an iPhone. We’ll need to set up the page logic on this page.

  1. Click the Add Page Logic button on the top of the Survey Design page.
  1. Click “Questions” as the condition type
  2. Set up the questions, logic operators, and answer choices for the respondents that you want disqualified, as outlined below:

In this case, if the respondent is not male, is not in the 30-50 age group, or does not own an iPhone, they will be disqualified and taken to the disqualified redirection URL.

  1. Next, select “Panel Integration” from the “Select an Option” dropdown.
  2. Choose “Disqualified and Redirect to Website” from the “Select Redirection” dropdown, and then click “Click Here to Configure URL”.
  3. In “Enter Base URL”, enter the “Disqualified” URL provided by the panel company without the appended paths or values.
  4. E.g. if the URL is “https://mypanelcompany.com/disqualified?responseid=RID113&projectid=PID210”,
  5. then enter “https://mypanelcompany.com”
  6. If the URL has a fixed part, select “Fixed Field” from “Select Field Type” and enter the fixed part of the URL. Here the fixed part is “/disqualified?”
  7. Select “Custom Field” from “Select Field Type” to map the custom fields of the panel company to the corresponding custom fields of the survey.

To view the page logic in the design section, expand the page logic banner on the page with the qualifying questions.

Setting Up Redirect URLs for Completed Surveys

As mentioned in the previous section, we want male respondents aged 30-50 to provide feedback on iPhones. Respondents that meet these conditions should be redirected to the “iPhone Feedback” page. After they complete the survey and click Submit, they should be redirected (unconditionally) to the “Complete” URL provided by the panel company.

To set this up, you would add unconditional page logic to the final page in your survey (“iPhone Feedback” in our case) by following these steps:

  1. Navigate to the “iPhone Feedback” page.
  2. Click Add Page Logic.
  1. Choose Unconditional as the condition type.
  1. Rename the group and choose “Panel Integration” from the actions dropdown. Then select “Complete and Redirect to Website” from the “Select Redirection” dropdown.
  1. If you have not previously configured the redirection URLs, click the “Click Here to Configure URL link”.
  1. In “Enter Base URL”, enter the “Complete” URL provided by the panel company without any appended paths or values.
    1. E.g. if the URL is “https://mypanelcompany.com/complete?responseid=RID112&projectid=PID210”, then enter “https://mypanelcompany.com”
  2. If the URL has a fixed part (a set of the URL that is identical for all complete responses but not part of the base URL), select “Fixed Field” from “Select Field Type” and enter the fixed part of the URL. Here the fixed part is “/complete?”
  3. Select “Custom Field” from “Select Field Type” to map the custom fields of the panel company to the corresponding custom fields of the survey. Once complete, our sample redirection URL looks like this:
  1. Save the page logic.

To view the page logic in the design section, expand the page logic section on the corresponding page.

Setting Up Redirect URLs for Quota Full

Once one or more of your quotas have been met, additional respondents in those categories will be redirected to the “Quota Full” URL, which will indicate to the panel company that they should no longer invite respondents that meet the criteria specified.

To set this up, we will go to the survey settings (click Survey Settings from the survey design page or click the Setting icon from the My Surveys page) and choose “Automatically Close Survey By Date/Time or Manage Quotas”.

In the Configure Survey Quota section, click Create Quota and choose Questions as the condition type. Configure the questions, operators, answer choices, and response limit for the groups you would like to set. Here’s an example for our limit of 100 respondents in the 30-50 male group:

For the quota full action, choose “Panel Integration” and then from the Select Redirection dropdown, choose Quota Full and Redirect to Website. Then click “Click Here to Configure URL”.

In Enter Base URL, enter the URL for “Quota Full” provided by the panel company without the appended paths or values. E.g. if the URL is “https://mypanelcompany.com/quota full?responseid=RID114&projectid=PID210”, enter “https://mypanelcompany.com”.

If the URL has a fixed segment, select “Fixed Field” from “Select Field Type” and enter the fixed part of the URL. In our example the fixed part is “/quota full?”.

Select “Custom Field” from “Select Field Type” to map the custom fields of the panel company to the corresponding custom fields of the survey and then save the quota.

When the quota is met, the application will automatically visit the custom URL created by the redirection protocol, which will notify the panel company that the quota was met.

Important Notes

  • Base URLs should be in the format https://www.mywebsite.com or https://www.mywebsite.com. The characters ?, !, #, *, _ are not allowed in the base URL.
  • The following characters are allowed in the fixed field: Question mark (?) | Underscore (_) | Colon (:) | Letters (A-Z, a-z) | Ampersand (&) | Period (.) | Forward slash (/) | Numbers (0-9) | Tilde (~) | Equal sign (=) | Hyphen (-) | Space.
  • The following characters are allowed in the custom fields: Hyphen (-) | Underscore (_) | Period (.) | Letters (A-Z, a-z) | Space | Tilde (~) | Numbers (0-9)
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