Todd Hollander Market Research

Many websites request visitors to take part in an online survey. These invitations generally fall into one of three formats: static text, banners, or pop-ups. Here are the pros and cons of using these types of invitations to find survey respondents.

These types of requests are inexpensive to administer but include two inherent drawbacks:

1. They tend to produce very low response rates
2. Because the sample of respondents is entirely self-selecting, the results are not representative of a larger audience (e.g., all customers)

Thus, although these invitations can provide useful feedback, they are not a good substitute for more traditional methods of locating survey respondents. Think of the information gleaned from this type of survey as qualitative/directional rather than quantitative/conclusive.

For more information about finding respondents, see these posts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Finding Respondents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.