SurveyMonkey Audience Custom Balancing

Custom balancing lets you choose the breakdown of your responses in a SurveyMonkey Audience project. When you're getting responses from our Contribute, Rewards, or Global panel, you can use custom balancing to choose the distribution of completed responses you want from each gender or age group you're targeting. For example, get 80% of your completed responses from female respondents and 20% from male respondents.

To use custom balancing:

Create a Targeted Audience collector.
Under Basic Demographics, click Age or Gender.
Choose the Custom option. Any previously selected age or gender criteria is removed so you can use the custom balancing tool.
For Gender, use the slider scale to pick the percentage of responses you want from males and females.
For Age, click Edit and enter the minimum and maximum age range for each group you're looking to survey. You can target 2–8 different age groups. Next enter the percentage of complete responses you want from each group (the percentages must total 100%). Each age range should be 5 years or more (18–23 works, but 18–21 doesn't), and age groups can't overlap (you can't have both 18-30 and 25-35 as age groups). Click Save once you're done.
Take a look at your Project Details on the right side of the page to review your custom balancing selections and the additional cost per response.

TIP! Custom balancing restricts the pool of available people to take your survey, so you may have to buy a larger number of completed responses than you need. The exact number is variable and depends on: the number of age group, the size of each age group, the percentage of responses for each age group, and any custom gender balancing.

Completed Responses

Due to the nature of the system, the variability of response rates, and natural margin of error, we can't guarantee that you'll get the exact number of completed responses that you specified per gender and age. There's a fault tolerance of ±5 responses per gender group and age group. Read more about completed responses.

Using Both Age and Gender Balancing

You can use both custom age and gender balancing at the same time. When you do that, we combine the percentage of both gender and age balancing to determine the distribution of responses from each gender against each age group.

Let's say you're buying 500 completed responses and choose the following custom gender and age balancing settings:

Gender: Female 75%, Male 25%
Age: 18–29: 30%, When you do that, we combine the percentage of both gender and age balancing to determine the number of completed responses your project will receive: 70%

With these custom gender and age balancing options, the system calculates how many responses each gender + age group will get like this:

Completed Responses (500) * Female Responses (75%) * 18-29 Age Group (30%) = 113 responses
Completed Responses (500) * Female Responses (75%) * 30–39 Age Group (70%) = 263 responses
Completed Responses (500) * Male Responses (25%) * 18-29 Age Group (30%) = 38 responses
Completed Responses (500) * Male Responses (25%) * 30–39 Age Group (70%) = 88 responses

SurveyMonkey Audience: Additional Targeting Settings

Feature Importance (MaxDiff)

Using SurveyMonkey for Market Research

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey Audience Custom Balancing

Completed Responses

Using Both Age and Gender Balancing

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