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Adding your OWN Custom Questions

Many of you have asked if you can add your own questions to your demographic questionnaires, so it gives me great pleasure to announce that now you can! 

If you sign up for a Personal or Premium account, you’ll have access to many neat new features, one of which allows you freedom to ask your visitors anything you like for any given amount of time, and have the results alongside your core demographic data.

We’ve designed our Crowd Science Demographics Custom Questions feature to provide the full gamut of options to help you define the right question and obtain the results you want. Whether you want to add a multiple-choice / one answer question,  or a multiple-choice / multiple answer question, or an open text question, you have the ability to do it with minimal effort.  

Keeping aligned with Research principles, we believe in structuring each questionnaire to be as short and concise as possible.  This helps to keep your audience engaged throughout the length of the survey, therefore attaining better results. So with this in mind, we kept the maximum allotment of custom questions to 3 at a time.  There is no limit in the amount of options you can include in each question.  Depending on the type of question, you can set the order of how your assigned options are displayed in the questionnaire (i.e. as listed, randomly, reverse, alphabetically, reverse alphabetically), and the order in which they are displayed in your report.  You can also remove and add new questions at any point, and as mentioned earlier, run them for an indefinite amount of time.

Our hope is that we’ve given you the flexibility to find out what your audience thinks about the things that matter to you.   If you have any questions or need any help setting up your custom questions, as always, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at help@crowdscience.com.  I’ll be there to help you along the way.

Until next time, keep safe and have fun.

Crowd Science Ana

Preview of our upcoming BlogSat initiative

Over the coming weeks we will be talking about BlogSat as we prepare to launch this new initiative.

One of our objectives is to help publishers collect data on their audience using innovative methods while maintaining credibility through research fundamentals. We can help achieve this by providing publishers with easy to implement research survey bundles based on themes. The latest of these themes we are calling BlogSat (Blog Satisfaction).

Customer and web site satisfaction research has been run for many years and a few companies exist and focus solely on this area of research. Traditionally web site satisfaction is comprised of measuring a number of web site elements and components. These may include page loading speed, how easily it is to navigate the site, etc.

Blogs and bloggers are important and significant contributors to online content. The number of blogs being created daily is staggering and most media companies and individuals maintain a blog (or two) as a primary method of providing information.

The success of a blog is often measured by the number of pageviews, unique visitors, or ad revenue. While this is valid, many bloggers gauge success by the level of involvement by their audience and the loyalty of their readers. Involvement and loyalty is reflected in the number and quality of comments on a blog posting.

Crowd Science wants to take this one step further by helping to define a satisfaction metric specific to blogs. Blogs are different in many ways from “traditional” websites and we feel that the “traditional” web site satisfaction measures, while relevant, would miss some key components. Are you a blogger? Do you know how satisfied your readers are? Do you know what components of your blog contribute to reader satisfaction?

In the coming weeks we will be announcing more on this initiative and will be offering this functionality in a future release to all publishers. More to come…

Crowd Science Demographics is out of beta!

I’m excited to announce that today we’re bringing Crowd Science Demographics out of beta.

We’ve spent the last few months scaling our infrastructure, polishing our user experience, and adding new features. The team has been amazing and I think you’re going to like what they’ve done.

We’ll spend the next week or so updating our website and blogging about all of the new bits, but I just wanted to share a quick overview.

Come on in, it’s open

Now that we’re out of beta, anybody can come along and create an account. The invitation codes and the waiting list are gone.

Lots of new toys

We have a slew of new features, including the following:

• Custom questions provide a way to add new elements to the standardized questionnaires. Similar to an omnibus survey, you can now ask your audience anything you like and get the benefit of having results reported alongside and filterable by all of the core demographic data.
• Filtering and cross tabs allow you to tease apart and compare particular audience segments. Find out, for example, how the offline activity of heavy internet users differs from that of light internet users, or determine which subgroup is dragging household income numbers down.
• New time-in-day and day-in-week reports provide insight into how your audience changes through the hours of the day or the days in a week. Compare weekenders to the weekday crowd, or find out why your traffic is particularly strong or weak during particular times of the day.
• Aggregated reporting lets you roll up several sites and sub-sites into a single report. Define permanent channels by grouping sites or throw them together on the fly using tags.
• Custom media kit URLs and logos provide a more elegant way for you to share your audience data. You can upload logos and choose custom URLs to provide a branded but third-party validated experience for your buyers.

A plan for everyone

We debated long and hard about what the right pricing model is. I have no doubt that it’ll go through several iterations as we get a better grasp on how people make use of the system, but I think that what we have now is very reasonable and, frankly, pretty stinkin’ good value.

And of course, we’re committed to providing the core Crowd Science Demographics service for free to anybody that wants it.

So, we’re starting out with four plans: Free, Personal ($5/month), Premium ($200/month), and Custom. All of the details are over on our pricing page.

I think that just about does it.

To all of our beta customers, thanks for sticking with us! Ana will send out an email tomorrow to let you about what we have in store.

Don’t change the channel…

Crowd Scientists attending ad:tech

Crowd Science will be exhibiting at ad:tech New York on November 3-4, 2008. We will be parked at booth 413 and we hope to see you there!

Crowd Science & BlogWorld Expo 2008

A number of “Crowd Scientists” were in attendance for the Blog World Expo 2008 in Vegas this past month. Blog World was a coming out for Crowd Science launching to the world of bloggers. The demographics service was well received and even referred to as most promising of the trade show floor. Attending this show pushed us to make some decisions on branding and messaging, so everyone’s feedback was greatly appreciated.

BTW - the Crowd Science T-shirts in brown were in high demand - sorry to anyone who couldn’t get one.

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our booth.

Next stop - ad:tech New York .

Mentions on WebAppers and KillerStartups

Both WebAppers and KillerStartups posted about Crowd Science and our Demographics product this week. And WebAppers were kind enough to give away some invitations to our beta. Thanks guys, much appreciated!

Crowd Science at Blog World Expo

Crowd Science will be exhibiting at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, NV, September 20 - 21, 2008.   We’ll keep you posted on upcoming announcements. Make sure you stop by our booth. Hope to see you there!

Tip number two

A new post from my Tip series is well overdue.  But before I get to it, I’d like to give you a quick update on some of our progress.  We are getting closer each day at completely opening our doors to everyone who has signed up to Crowd Science Demographics. So stay tuned. And once again, we appreciate your patience.

Now, without further ado here is my next tip:

Tip Number Two:  Making the most of your website classification.

Whenever you add a new website, we’ll ask you to classify your website content by selecting categories from our predefined “Category” list provided on the “Edit your Site” page.  We recommend to review the entire list and classify your website appropriately to gather a richer data set.   If there is a category you feel we haven’t covered, you can manually classify your website by adding keywords on the “Tags” section.

Depending on how you classify your website, our system will select three or four different questions that are topic related to show to your visitors within your core profile survey.  For instance, if you select “video games”, we’ll ask questions about gaming (i.e. Which of the following game consoles do you currently own?). This will help you gain a broader/fuller picture of your audience, and their interests. We think it’s important to ask topic related questions on your profile survey not just to engage your audience, but to also gain a fuller picture of your audience’s thoughts and opinions on topic related areas that matter to you. 

We are carefully filling out our library of topic related questions, which will be an ongoing task to keep our library relevant and comprehensive.   So although some of you may not see topic related questions yet, still take the time to classify your website from the moment you sign up to take advantage of these questions as soon as they become available.

If you would like to review or edit your site categories or tags, go to your site Overview page and click on the “Site Settings” link to get to your “Edit your Site” page.  And don’t forget to save any changes you make.

Hope this helps.

Psst: If you have Crowd Science related questions or topics you want us to cover on our blog, just post a comment or shoot us an email at info@crowdscience.com, subject line: Blog Entry. 

The value of Demographics

Crowd Science Demographics is an enabling technology/service. Enabling in the terms that with this demographic data, you can use it along side your other web metrics (i.e. Google Analytics, Web Trends, etc.) to not only market/promote your site to advertisers, but to also gain a deeper understanding of your audience.  

Understanding who you reach can play an important role when building your content. Through Demographics, you are validating who you are reaching and whether your content is geared to or attracting the audience you are after. And this demographic, attitudinal and feedback data is directly from your audience.

If you drive revenue from advertising on your site, you can use your Media Kit as validation for advertisers. Particularly for sites responsible for their own ad targeting, knowing when and who visits your site helps you justify higher CPMs.

The beauty of demographics and analytics modeling in general, is that if using proper sampling techniques, you only need a small number of responses to have a representative sample. In fact, political polls representing an entire country with a high degree of accuracy is around 1,500 to 2,000.

We recommend 50 to be a minimum number of responses that you want to collect. Further, we recommend running any service that uses a sampling methodology on an on-going basis so you will be able to monitor changes over time, get feedback on your site content, and continue the promotion of your site. Over time as you collect more data, particularly as you approach 200 or more responses, your sample becomes more statistically relevant and provides opportunities for slicing and sub-profiling your data.

We are in data-rich times with consumers and publishers becoming more data-savvy. This makes for exciting times in the industry. Hopefully Demographics can provide some insight and value to your audience, and be another layer of enabling data.

RDD on the decline?

MR Web reports on Nielsen Media’s recent announcement that they will drop using RDD (random digit dialing) for recruiting paper diarists. Phone number portability and the rise in cell-only households has challenged the validity of the RDD methodology. While it is still a staple methodology for some sectors of research, over the years there has been some question to whether it is still a representative sampling method.