Audience Selection
Selecting an Audience
During project configuration, you will need to select an audience to target for your survey.
You have some choices when it comes to your audience selection. There are Representative Audiences, and Custom Audiences.
The exceptions are solutions in the Amplify and Activate It suite because a Representative Audience is pre-selected based on your chosen category.
Representative Audiences
Zappi's Representative Audiences connect you with the people who truly drive your brand’s growth, through high-quality, predictive, and efficient samples that balance reach, feasibility, and research rigor. This audience option combines country level demographic quotas with category and brand usage alignment to create a real-market representative, and stable sample.
We include not only loyal customers, but also light buyers and non-buyers, a group shown by empirical research to be a primary source of brand growth. Since the top 20% of buyers typically generate only half of total sales, focusing solely on loyal customers overlooks the other 80% who drive growth. You can measure true market impact, engage more light/non buyers, and build sustainable brand growth with this broader approach.
Benefits of Representative Audiences
- Reflects real market potential
- Zappi Representative Audiences focus on broad category buyers, not just loyal consumers, so you reach light buyers, non-buyers, and even unexpected buyers of the brand who fuel real brand growth. While it may be tempting, when you use a highly targeted audience, it can overstate market potential. They often over-represent brand loyalists or heavy buyers, the people more likely to respond positively and skew results. This broader audience gives you a truer, more complete view of your market potential.
- Backed by global benchmarks
- Compare performance against Zappi’s databases of results in your chosen category from similar audiences to gain meaningful context and stronger confidence in every decision.
- Built for consistency and comparability
- Stay on course. By keeping audience structures consistent across projects, you can reliably track shifts, trends, and progress over time.
- High quality and scalable
- Smart sampling strategies mean higher quality insights, that are also faster, more affordable and scalable.
Why This Approach Matters
By building a connected learning system, this approach helps your team scale research more effectively, track progress with consistency, and compound insight value over time. It lays the groundwork for smarter decisions, stronger predictability, and long-term learning that goes beyond individual projects.
We encourage teams to aspire to this model, as it sets the stage for more strategic, enterprise-level learning. Shifting away from this approach—toward more flexible, ad-hoc setups—comes with trade-offs, including reduced comparability, weaker predictability, and the loss of long-term learning continuity.
Other Options (Custom Audiences)
Not every team is aiming to build a broad, category-level audience from day one. If your priority is testing with key strategic groups, we offer other options to guide you through building feasible audiences. If you go this route, we make it easy to use this audience again and again, driving meaningful, comparable results for your business to learn from over time.
- Reach Key Subgroups with Expert Support
- If you need to target a specific subgroup, like occasional buyers or niche segments, our Professional Services team can build a custom audience with you (where feasible, for an additional fee), ensuring you reach exactly who matters most.
- Broader context through market benchmarks
- Even when focusing on a custom or niche subgroup, you can still compare your results against Zappi’s broader normative databases for directional insights.
- Build your own consistent benchmarks
- As long as you test consistently against your chosen audience, you can still track shifts, trends, and performance over time.
Whether you select a ready-made Zappi Representative Audience or collaborate with our team to create a custom audience, every audience is designed to deliver reliable insights that build over time, helping you spot meaningful shifts, deepen your understanding, and make smarter, more confident decisions.
How to access your audience library
As an admin user, you can see a list of available audiences or request a custom one.
Click on your avatar in the bottom left and select organization settings. Select ‘Audiences’ from the menu on the left.
You can see a detailed list of your audiences, including the status if you have requested a new audience build.
If you need a custom audience, click ‘Request New Audience’ in the top right of this screen. Go to our article on custom audience builds for more information.
How to download audience details
As an Admin, you can export the following audience details as a CSV file:
- Name
- Description
- Market
- For each question in the audience:
- The question text
- The question type
- For each quota:
- the name
- the percentage
- the answers
There are two ways to export audience details:
- From the audience library, go to the 'Actions' column and click Export.
- From the audience library, click on an audience, and the audience details drawer will appear. Click Export in the upper right corner.
Once you select ‘Export’, the file will automatically start downloading.
Selecting an audience during project configuration
When selecting your audience, you get dynamic audience recommendations based on:
- Your most recently or frequently used
- Your Organization's most recently or frequently used
- Newest
- Frequently used Zappi-wide
These recommendations are based on your personal use, your company use, and Zappi-wide use in that order.
You’ll see some information about each audience right in the list. If you want to know more, you can access the details of each audience by clicking the expansion button to see usage IR, screening, quotas and more.
Survey Tab
The Survey tab displays key information for each screening question used in audience targeting.
Displayed Elements
- Question Text
- Answer Options
- Question Type
- Single-choice
- Multi-choice
- These are indicated by the symbols next to the question.
Quota Information:
- Qualifying: Respondents must select these answers to qualify for the survey.
- Disqualifying: Respondents who select these answers will be disqualified and removed from the survey.
- Filler: These answer options disguise your qualifying and disqualifying answers. If a respondent selects only filler answers, they will not qualify.
- Answer Settings: Indicates how answer choices are presented
- Fixed: Anchors an option in place when other choices are randomized.
- Randomized: Shuffles answer choices to minimize order bias.
- Exclusive: Deselects all other options when selected for example, 'None of the Above'.
Quotas Tab
The Quotas tab outlines how each question contributes to audience qualification.
Displayed Elements
- Question Text and Type
- Answer Options
- Single-Choice
- Multi-choice
- Quota Groups: Shows what percentage of the audience should fall into each group.
- Answer Options
FAQ
Which Zappi solutions let you choose an audience?
You can select an audience for Zappi solutions except Amplify, Activate It & Prioritize It. These three solutions use a Representative Audience exclusively based on your chosen category.
Why do Amplify and Activate It audiences appear in the audience selection?
Audiences for these solutions use Representative Audiences exclusively, but these are a great option for any project. You can use Representative Audiences on other solutions to improve data consistency across your projects and allow you to compare results easily from multiple solutions.
Do I get to see all the available audiences?
Yes, you get to see all the available audiences ranked based on your usage. You can filter, search, and see general information about each audience so you can easily identify the one you want to use.
Can a customer see other customers' audiences?
No, unless they have been created as a shared audience.
Why do I see audiences that are for a category other than the one I have selected?
The more you and your organization uses the platform, the more relevant audience recommendations you will get, so in most cases you should only see only recommendations relevant for your category. You can use the search functionality to narrow down the audience list.