Pre-targeting & Audience Strategy

What Is Pre-targeting?

Pre-targeting identifies eligible respondents before they enter the screener, using existing panel profile data. Where profile data is available, pre-targeting can reduce the number of screener questions needed, improve respondent experience, and make recruitment more efficient.


Not all pre-targeting criteria work the same way, some are automated, others require manual setup.

Automated Pre-targeting

Applied automatically, no extra setup or fee:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Country
  • Region (where supported)
  • US State* (*must be requested prior to audience build for data to show)

Because these are selected before respondents enter the survey, they typically don't affect incidence rate (IR), they mainly affect overall recruitment feasibility.


Exception: automated targeting can still reduce feasibility when combined with highly specific requirements, such as:

  • Gender-specific categories (e.g., feminine hygiene products)
  • Location-specific categories (e.g., regional grocery chains)

In these cases, the available population is simply smaller, making recruitment harder regardless of automation.


Serviced (Manual) Pre-targeting

Some audience characteristics aren't available through standard automation and require a manual serviced audience request with a $1,000 fee:

  • Healthcare professionals or patients
  • Ethnicity
  • Socioeconomic level (SEL) / income
  • Smokers
  • Pet owners
  • Business professionals (B2B)
  • Students
  • Parents with children of specific ages
  • Region-specific targeting (DMAs, counties, ZIP codes)

These require additional sourcing and validation beyond standard setup, hence the added cost and lead time.


Best Practices for Effective Audience Design

Prioritize stable, repeatable audiences. Avoid over-customization that:


  • Creates overly niche audiences
  • Reduces comparability across studies
  • Increases recruitment difficulty
  • Lowers IR significantly

Keep screeners short. Long or complex screeners drive up survey fatigue, drop-off, recruitment cost, and respondent confusion. Target fewer than 5 questions and under 1 minute to complete.


Maintain healthy IR. Aim for 20% minimum, 50%+ ideal — this supports faster recruitment, lower costs, and better respondent quality.


A strong audience/screener design should:


  • Define the core target audience clearly
  • Minimize unnecessary complexity
  • Use consistent targeting definitions over time
  • Maintain feasible recruitment requirements
  • Support repeatable business learning

How pre-targeting and screeners work together

Pre-targeting and disciplined screener design work together to support efficient targeting, reusable custom audiences, stable longitudinal learning, faster fielding, and a better respondent experience, even though this means some advanced customization isn't available.

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