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Seven reasons why everyone should be thinking about site-centric demographics

Seven reasons why everyone should be thinking about site-centric demographics.

1. Know your audience. These are the folks actually on your site: you need to know them inside and out. Beyond basic demographics are visitor psychographics.
2. Profile who is visiting your site. Traffic stats are only part of the picture. Detailed and accurate portraits of online visitors are worth their weight in gold.
3. Tailor your content and offers. Detailed profiles allow you to customize offers based on who is visiting your site at any given time. Or, you could allocate ad space based on categories, interests, and behaviors.
4. React faster to emerging trends. Because you're getting real-time info, you can spot key indicators early and adjust your messaging and offers accordingly.
5. Ensure your advertising spend is hitting the right target. Whether you're a publisher or advertiser, profiles ensure that you are delivering the right message to the right audience.
6. Increase the impact of your research dollars. Site-centric research is very cost-effective. More importantly, the data is richer and allows you to do more.
7. Develop relevant partnerships. Partners are a great way to broaden your reach, as long as you can show them what you've got.

If any of these reasons strike a chord, maybe it's time to consider what site-centric demographics can do for you: all you need to do is ask.

Workplace ‘firmographic’ measurement offers added dimension to audience measurement

Crowd Science has now expanded its profile surveys to include “firmographics” questions, which help to bring a new level to audience profiling. Firmographics offer insight into company size, industry, job role, etc. Looking for executives? People in the construction industry? People in companies with fewer than 50 employees? Our expanded survey provides information like this, and more. This new enhancement is available immediately to current subscribers of the Crowd Science Demographics service.

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

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.

About the beta (and me)

Well, now that the launch is behind us and we have things more or less under control, I thought it was time we gave a little bit of information about the beta and where we’re heading.

But before I do that, I should introduce myself. My name is John Martin, and I’m CEO and co-founder of Crowd Science. I’ll be posting here along with the rest of the team about the product and the research/analytics industry and maybe a little about building the company, but you can also follow me on my personal blog or on Twitter.

So, last week we opened the public beta of our first product, Crowd Science Demographics. As part of the coverage from TechCrunch and Mashable, we gave away a few hundred invitations. Apart from some traffic-induced hiccups on the morning of the launch, we’re doing pretty well capacity-wise, and with a little luck we’ll open up some more spaces later this week.

What are we working on right now? Apart from some amazing new reporting features that we can’t talk about just yet…

• We realize that the application is pretty thin on documentation, and are in the process of filling in all of the various nooks and crannies with instructions and descriptions and are working on a proper help system.
• We have some new tools for testing and customizing invitations in the works.
• We’re just about ready to switch on the inline survey system that we’ve hinted at on our website.

And, of course, we’re doing lots of research on research, trying to figure out what’s working in the field (and more importantly, what isn’t) and why.

As always, feedback is very much appreciated. You can leave a comment here or send us an email or start a thread over on our Get Satisfaction page.