How to Get Participants For Your Study


This guide outlines the range of options available for getting respondents for your experiments and helps you choose the best one for your experiment.

Target specific panel respondents

Buy responses from the panel network. Target them by location, demographics, and profiling questions.

Select or request a pre-defined panel

Specify your own niche criteria for research assembled into a pre-built panel.

Bring your own respondents

Use a list of your customers or leads, or source respondents from elsewhere.

How we source respondents?

Conjointly delivers quality respondents straight into your survey, blending global sample sources with niche and local panels. With access to hundreds of online survey panels worldwide, we can provide you with numerous options to match your specific needs. Our partners offer broad targeting and reach that covers a diverse range of deeply-profiled audiences to ensure you receive relevant and insightful responses. If you have additional requirements for your panel, our expert team is available to support you.

Panel recruitment process

The Conjointly fieldwork team works diligently with panel partners to direct quality respondents to your survey through the following process:

  1. Respondents sign up to one of our partners who ask them an extensive list of profiling questions, including (but not limited to) demographics, shopping/spending habits, and nature of household

  2. We determine feasibility and cost by evaluating profile respondents to create time and cost efficiencies.

    For example, if you require 100 iPhone users, we will send 100 survey invitations directly to people who have already identified themselves as iPhone users, rather than inviting a larger sample size (e.g. 200) with hopes that enough will fit the requirement. I.e. the more profiling we do, the cheaper the sample will be and the more accurate our feasibility estimates will be.

  3. Once you launch an experiment with a pre-defined panel, we inform our panel providers to start inviting respondents from their panels to our survey link, using profiling where possible. Aside from receiving a survey link via email from the supplier, respondents may also find surveys on websites/apps that the supplier operates.

  4. Respondents launch the experiment through the survey link, where they are taken to our screening questions (see more below). Respondents who do not qualify for the survey (e.g. an Android phone user) are redirected to the supplier. Qualifying respondents are redirected to Conjointly to complete your experiment. If our system detects that they are providing low-quality responses (e.g. answering questions too quickly), they will be redirected to the supplier and identified as a “low-quality response”.

  5. Upon survey completion, respondents are redirected to the supplier to claim their incentive. Following this process, we will sometimes review the actual observed cost and feasibility of the pre-defined panel and adjust the price or sample size accordingly.

Panel costs are calculated per respondent and will vary depending on country, age, and other characteristics. The Conjointly platform quotes costs in real-time as you complete the panel selection process. Once you launch your experiment, we will confirm feasibility and immediately start data collection, which normally takes less than two days.

Our panel partners manage and provide incentives for the panellists, which may include monetary payouts, coupons, points, vouchers, charity donations, and lottery draws. Respondent participation is voluntary – recruitment involves a double opt-in procedure and confirmation of personal information. As with other respondents, we monitor the quality of panel responses (e.g. how much time they spend per questions) and you will only pay for complete, quality responses.

Options for sourcing respondents on Conjointly

Option 1: Target specific panel respondents

Use Target specific panel respondents if you would like to define your own profiling for respondents that are invited to complete your survey. This option allows you to target respondents by country, region, age, gender, and deep profiling characteristics. To select this option:

  • Open the Choose participants tab.
  • Select Target specific panel respondents.
  • Choose your desired demographics from the drop-down menus.
Targeting specific panel respondents

Deep profiling: You can also filter respondents based on specific questions they have previously answered with our panel provider (these questions vary by country). For example, to survey people in a certain income bracket, choose a question about income and select all the answers that correspond to the people you’d like to survey. To add this filter:

  • Open the Choose participants tab.
  • Click the Add filter button in the Panel responses: Profile of respondents module.
  • Select your filtering question and desired answer(s) from their respective drop-down menus.
Filtering respondents based on previously answered profiling questions

If you require more specific criteria that is not listed here, please check our list of pre-defined panels as we may already have a price and sample size for what you are looking for.

Option 2: Select a pre-defined panel

This option provides you with a selection of pre-defined sample definitions. You can select either:

  • A general-purpose pre-defined panel (e.g. USA general population), or
  • A definition of panel that we have recorded from your company’s past experiments. Once you have entered the required number of responses, the system will provide an estimated cost, timeframe, and feasibility.

For all pre-defined panels, you can review the screening questions that are used to profile respondents:

  1. Open the Choose participants tab.
  2. Select your panel from the drop-down menu under the Use a pre-defined panel option.
  3. Click the Review screening questions button:
Selecting a pre-defined panel and reviewing screening questions

In some panel names, we may use research jargon and industry definitions.

If you have a specific sample requirement that is not listed in the existing predefined panels, please get in touch with us with the following information:

  • Target sample size
  • Demographics (if required)
    • Location (including any regional quotas or restrictions),
    • Age range,
    • Gender,
    • Income,
    • Other relevant demographic information.
  • Screening criteria (if required)
    • Past purchase behaviour, shopping habits or intent to buy x product (i.e. past six months buyers of cars).
    • Target profile (home owners, pregnant women, etc.).
  • Any additional quotas (if required)

We will get back to you with an estimate cost and feasibility of your panel request.

Option 3: Bring your own respondents

To invite your own respondents to participate in your launched survey, you have two options:

  • Shareable survey link, or
  • Sending email invitations directly from Conjointy.

Each survey generates an active link which you can share with your desired respondents once you launch your experiment.

Link for sharing survey with respondents

Sending email invitations

You can send email invitations to your mailing lists using Conjointly’s My Audiences functionality. To do so, select the desired audience and add a campaign for the experiment.

Sending email invitations

FAQs

How many respondents do I need?

The system will automatically provide a recommended minimum sample size based on the settings of your experiment. This minimum sample size is acceptable for exploratory research. It is recommended to aim for a higher sample size if:

  • You need to achieve higher confidence in the findings (e.g. when significant policy or managerial implications are attached), or

  • You are aiming to explore segments. For example, if you are looking to explore two or three pre-defined segments in your experiment (e.g. people split by age: under 20 years old, 21 to 40 years old, 41 and over), apply the recommended sample size to each of the three pre-defined segments.

It is fine to oversample if you keep the proportions of your groups (e.g., if you are aiming at 50%/50% female/male split, your sample should remain 50%/50%) – in fact, the more respondents the better for statistical robustness.

Does length of interview affect cost of panel?

No, the number of questions in your study does not affect the panel price.

What is the optimal survey length?

We recommend keeping the survey to no more than 15 minutes in length to avoid respondent fatigue - which can lessen the quality of results.

What demographic information is included with the purchased panel?

The panel will include variables such as occupation status, industry sector, marital status, accommodation, income, education, etc. (based on their profiling information in the panel). Please note, these variables may only be updated once every few months. If you have a specific set of demographic variables that you would like to view the report on, we recommend including them in the “Additional questions” tab.

How many additional questions can I include before, during, and after the conjoint portion?

There isn’t any limit to the number of question you can add, but we typically recommend to keep the length of survey to no more than 15 minutes as it may cause respondent fatigue. As a guideline, the conjoint questions typically take 4-7 minutes.

Can I source a combination of my own respondents and a Conjointly pre-defined panel?

Yes, you can include respondents from both a pre-defined panel as well as those you bring yourself.

The first step is to launch the experiment using data from a pre-defined panel — shown above in Option 2. Once you have launched your experiment, you can share the survey link directly with your own respondents, as shown in Option 3.

What is the difference between a hard and soft quota?

We achieve hard quotas to within a 5% margin of error. For example, a hard quota of 100 male and 100 female respondents will have at least 95 male and 95 female.

For soft quotas, we will attempt to fill the quota as best we can, but will prioritise keeping the speed of the data collection. Soft quotas are often used in regard to even spread of age, gender, income, or region. For example, we will attempt to spread the responses across all the income brackets, but we do not guarantee any specific numbers for any of the brackets.

What do I need to consider before launching a panel?

When launching your survey through targeting specific panel respondents or using a predefined panel, we recommend considering the following points:

  • We will be overseeing all screening logic, quotas, survey redirects, and low-quality termination criteria. You can get in touch with us to ensure that your criteria are taken into account through your panel, rather than your experiment.
  • We do not support external links when launching through a panel. For example, asking respondents to click on an external link to check out your product’s web page, then asking them to continue working on the survey.
  • Once data collection is complete, our team will upload the results for all screening questions to your survey as external variables. This means that you do not have to repeat screening questions in your survey so that respondents don’t have to answer the same question twice.

What if I just need people to help test my study?

In this case, Conjointly offers the cost-efficient Quick Feedback option.