What are the kinds of online research panels?
Is doing research online the best way to do your study? What’s good and bad about it? Before we can answer these questions, we need to know what an online research panel is.
What, exactly, is an online research panel? An online research panel is a group of people who have agreed to take surveys over the Internet. This is the basic definition. It is a group of people with similar characteristics who are asked to fill out an online survey about a certain research topic in exchange for a reward.
B2C
B2C stands for “business to consumer,” and B2C online research panels include target consumers and end users from different groups, such as car owners, music fans, and hotel guests. Depending on what the study needs, you can set the parameters to be very broad or very narrow. You can also ask the target consumers about their behaviours and opinions about things that may be related to the products and services you offer. In this category of online research panels, you can find out what people think about your products or services. This will help you make better decisions and improve the performance of your brand.
B2B
B2B stands for “business to business.” It means research on businesses and how they work, not on individual consumers. B2B panels include people from different industries, such as business owners, business decision makers, and business professionals who can give very accurate and well-informed answers. When you want to expand into new markets or strengthen your position in existing ones, B2B online research panels can help you by giving you real data and important insights about products or services. This will help you make decisions. B2B online research panels can help you keep up with global and local business changes by letting you target important people like IT and HR decision makers, financial analysts, executives, and small business owners.
Healthcare/Medical
This niche category can be used by both doctors and their patients. Market researchers can ask about a patient’s condition and treatment, as well as about the doctor’s diagnosis and prescriptions. Because of the circumstances, it makes sense that these panels are smaller than B2B and B2C panels. You can also understand that healthcare studies are made for online survey panels.
How do online panels for research work?
Technology has made it easier for market researchers to do surveys, but it has also made it easier for people to make fake profiles to get more rewards from online surveys. Here are some of the ways people can give false answers to surveys:
- They can lie about who they are by getting random directory information.
- They can get email addresses for free.
- They can hide by using a different IP address.
- They can use bots to send responses on their own.
- Online providers especially need to manage, screen and verify their panels to avoid getting fake panellists and come up with real, verified data. It’s important to have a proper survey panel verification process because the data quality is based on honest and well-thought-out answers from real online research panels.
The general steps for making sure that panellists are who they say they are are:
- Initial verification is done by double-checking the information a potential panellist gives when he or she joins.
- When taking surveys, it is common to check cookies and IP addresses.
- There are other ways to make sure panellists are who they say they are, like checking the survey results as they come in. If panellists break any of these rules for verification, they risk being taken off the database.
To avoid any confusion and complicated process, you can simply hire us to do everything for you.