Overview

Online Market Research, Redefined

Crowd Science is changing the game in online market research by leveraging the benefits of both web analytics and survey research to produce more accurate, dependable results. This revolutionary combination makes it easier, quicker, and more cost effective to conduct online research, and opens up a world of new research and measurement possibilities.

With its innovative technology platform, its proprietary methodology, and its suite of special purpose research apps, Crowd Science is helping publishers, brands, agencies, and ad networks generate insights that increase ad sales, inform editorial decisions, and demonstrate the efficacy of marketing.

The New Definition

For many years, telephone interviews and random digit dialing were the gold standard in sampling. That is no longer the case. Today, the best representation of consumer, business, and political populations can be found online. However, unlike the old world, there is no universal and statistically sound way of reaching respondents online.

Current solutions – particularly those based on convenience samples, such as email or tracked panels – leave a large gap in audience understanding and are prone to bias. Audiences are tremendously fragmented. Digital media has evolved from a simple menu of websites to a blend of technologies, including video, audio, blogs and mobile applications, which carry content and marketing campaigns that are in constant flux. Panels, no matter how large, are too blunt an instrument to address this complexity.

Crowd Science solves this problem by providing a turnkey solution for sampling online populations in real time, directly on websites, avoiding the bias inherent in pre-recruited panels and providing an extensive array of segmentation and filtering options based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes.

The Crowd Science Research Platform

The Crowd Science Research Platform allows you to conduct better research – on a continuous basis. Created by leading technologists and methodology experts in online research and audience measurement, Crowd Science provides a level of automation and sophistication not available from any other vendor or off-the-shelf product.

The core innovation in the Crowd Science Research Platform is the combination of behavioral and survey-based data collection. This provides three major benefits:

• Superior accuracy – Accuracy is immeasurably important in all forms of research, but especially in digital media research, where ad inventory is bought and sold on the basis of a few demographic percentage points. Accuracy is also exceedingly difficult to achieve online.
• Unrivaled automation – Bounce rates, sampling frequencies, and research inventory are a thing of the past. The sampling engine inside Crowd Science uses real time traffic modeling to ensure that quota targets are filled on the day and hour of your choosing without any effort or oversight.
• A richer data set – The combination of behavioral and survey-based data collection provides a rich palette with which compelling new audience insight can be generated. Use Crowd Science to compare the demography of search and social media traffic, explore the visitation patterns of particular customer segments, or determine the behavioral drivers of website satisfaction.

In addition to this unique data collection engine, the platform provides feature-rich reporting and massively scalable data warehousing, resulting in an unparalleled end-to-end research experience.

Off-the-Shelf Market Research Applications

The Crowd Science Research Platform powers a growing number of research apps – turnkey solutions for specific research needs.

Research apps provide turnkey solutions for specific research needs. Today, there are two such apps available:

• Audience Profiler – On-demand measurement of demographic, firmographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes. Great for ad supported publishers to arm their sales teams and for brands to determine the relative value of traffic acquisition.
• Campaign Profiler – Easy-to-use, respondent-friendly campaign research. A test/control-based offering that measures efficacy in the form of demography, recall, and attitudinal impact.

Once a site has been tagged, research apps can be activated and deactivated with the click of a button. And for more complex research projects, Crowd Science provides full-service custom research support and analysis.

SmartSample™

At the heart of the Crowd Science Research Platform, and the entire lineup of research apps, is SmartSample™, our proprietary online research methodology. SmartSample™ provides a way to measure online audiences with a level of accuracy and granularity not possible with any other solution. It is a set of mathematical models, technologies, and research guidelines that allow Crowd Science to make sense of the unstructured web and its fragmented audience and provide the validity and reliability required to inform critical business decisions and buy and sell media.

SmartSample™ is a holistic online audience research methodology that addresses behavioral and survey data collection as well as providing guidelines for:

• the design and behavior of survey invitations
• cookie management
• the length and content of questionnaires

Next Steps

To learn more about Crowd Science’s research products, please contact our sales team.