Audience for Amplify
Understanding audiences in Amplify
Amplify gives you flexibility in how you define the audience for your research. To help ensure your results are meaningful and actionable, audiences are grouped into three tiers.
Audience tiers
| Zappi Recommended | The default option. These audiences are built by Zappi using our recommended quotas and sample archetypes. They're designed to deliver stable, reliable results and are the best starting point for most research. |
| Approved | A customised audience that starts from a Zappi Recommended audience and adjusts within our accepted guardrails. These still deliver reliable results and are a good option when you need to tailor your audience to a specific brief. |
| Custom | An audience that goes beyond our standard guardrails. You can still run research with a custom audience as long as it's feasible to collect the sample (incidence rate above 30%) and an adapted norm is available. Results will need to be interpreted with that context in mind. |
What makes an audience "Approved"?
When you customize an audience, the following rules determine whether it stays within the approved range. Breaking any of these moves the audience into unapproved territory.
| Recruitment Criterion | Approved Guardrail |
| Incidence Rate | Must be 30% IR or above. Below this, the audience is unfeasible and cannot be run. |
| Income / SEC | Any income or SEC group can be adjusted by up to 10% from nat rep quotas. Beyond this, scores are likely to be inflated. |
| Age | Age groups can be decreased by up to 10% from nat rep quotas. Increasing middle-aged groups may inflate scores. |
| Gender | A 50/50 split is preferred, but up to 70/30 is allowed, provided age quotas are also interlocked. For gendered categories, 100% male or female audiences are permitted with nat rep age quotas. |
| Ethnicity | Setting quotas by ethnicity (beyond average nat rep fallouts) is unapproved. Boosts will be available later in 2026. |
| Child category frequency targeting (<50% IR) | Targeting by usage frequency within a category with under 50% IR is unapproved — high scores and low IR likely. |
| Child category targeting outside CPG (<50% IR) | Targeting users, owners, or participants at child category level where IR is below 50% is unapproved. Use parent-level targeting, or consider non-rejectors if they bring IR above 50%. |
| Brand frequency targeting | Requiring respondents to be brand users is unapproved this biases results and inflates scores. |
Category-specific guardrails also apply. These define which audience archetypes are permitted for each vertical and parent category, and work alongside the quota rules above. An audience needs to satisfy both to be considered approved.
Is my audience approved?
When setting up your audience, Amplify will indicate whether your configuration falls within approved guardrails. If your audience is flagged as unapproved, you'll still be able to proceed (provided IR is above 30%), but your results will be reported against an adapted norm rather than the standard curated norm.
A Note on scores within approved audiences
Audience tier isn't the only thing that affects your scores. Even within approved audiences, a "category user" sample will score higher than a "non-rejector," and emotive categories like chocolate or pets will naturally outscore lower-interest ones like insurance.
The audience tier system tells you how to interpret your benchmark, but all the usual considerations around category and audience choice still apply. The added flexibility in Amplify introduces an extra dynamic to factor in, but it doesn't replace the judgment calls you'd normally make when setting up your research.