Custom Audience Build | Zappi Professional Service

Some of our customers need a tailored approach to their audience, and we're here to help. Custom Audience Build is a professional service during which one of our audience experts can design and build a custom audience that matches your requirements while still following best practices to ensure the audience is feasible. Once the audience is available you will be charged a one-off build fee, and the audience will be enabled on your Zappi Platform for ongoing use as part of your programmatic use of the platform. 

At Zappi, we also offer standard audiences. These are prebuilt audiences offered in many of our most popular categories for no additional cost. 

How to Request a Custom Audience Build

You can either request a custom audience build yourself or your dedicated project consultant (if you have one) can do so for you, as part of a project. Learn more about working with a project consultant.

Admin users can request directly via Organization settings > Audiences > Request new audience or please contact your customer representative for assistance.

How to Use the Audience Inquiry Form

The Audience Inquiry form allows you to submit a request for a custom audience that is not currently available on the platform.  Once you submit your request, our audience experts will provide you with recommendations and best practices to ensure you achieve the right audience to fit your needs.

Best Practices for Filling Out Inquiry Form

To ensure your request is processed quickly and accurately, please follow these best practices:

  • Ensure it’s an audience you will be able to use repeatedly: Your audience should be something that you can use for future research wherever possible, not just on an ad-hoc project level.
  • Double check for existing audiences: Save time by checking your existing audiences before submitting a new request, you might find exactly what you need is already available!
  • Be Clear: Provide detailed descriptions and clear targeting criteria to avoid ambiguity.
  • Include Relevant Context: Explain why the audience is needed and how it will be used to help the review team understand your request.

Best Practice Note: We recommend our customers survey as broad an acceptable audience as possible. Only asking questions to a narrow audience puts brands at risk of missing opportunities or pitfalls in populations just beyond their strictest customer base. If your audience request doesn't have a feasible incidence rate, your account manager or customer success manager will come back to you with a recommendation for how to build it so we can run it on the Zappi platform.

Completing the form

1. Audience Details

  • Audience Name: provide a clear and descriptive name for the new audience to help distinguish it from existing audiences. This can consist of your brand name and any additional screening criteria like demographics, behaviors, or any other defining factors to help you easily search and identify later on. 
    • For example: (Brand Z) P3M Granola Bar Purchasers
  • Audience Description: provide a general overview of the audience you want to build, including your screening criteria and any additional filter cuts that you want to include questions on.
    • For example: Screening: P3M Granola Bar Purchasers, Filtering: Ethnicity & Income
  • Country & Language: Select all countries you plan to use this audience in.

2. Demographics & Quotas

There are two ways to set up your demographic quotas:

  • Natural fallout: If you don’t want any quotas for age and gender, simply enable the Natural Fallout toggle. By selecting this option, your survey will fill naturally allowing respondents aged between 18 to 75 years old. This is the fastest way to set up an audience.
  • Custom percentages: To set up specific quotas for age and gender, you can type in a percentage or use the sliding scale. For age, you can add up to five different age ranges by clicking on the ‘Add Quota’ button.

3. Screening & Filtering

Screening and filtering questions help refine your audience ensuring it meets your criteria and is fit for purpose. They differ from one another and should be used carefully:

  • Screening questions are questions that respondents must answer in a certain way in order to qualify and participate in your survey. You can set up qualifying answers, disqualifying answers and filler answers to target respondents.
    • Qualifying answers: respondents must select these answers to qualify for the survey.
    • Disqualifying answers: respondents who select these answers will be disqualified and removed from the survey.
    • Filler answers: these answer options disguise your qualifying and disqualifying answers. If a respondent selects only filler answers, they will not qualify.
  • Filtering questions do not screen anyone out but are used later in analysis to cut your data.

We recommend using a maximum of two screening questions to ensure your audience remains broad enough and a maximum of three filtering questions to further drill down into different subgroups. If you prefer to focus on the flexibility to filter and cut your data, include only one to screen and use the remaining questions for filtering.

Examples for screening criteria and filtering options

When defining your audience, consider what distinguishes them from the larger population.

  • For example, if you're targeting salty snack consumers from the past three months, you might ask: “How often do you typically buy salty snacks?”

Think about how you might want to cut the data:

  • It can be useful to segment datasets by brand usage, frequency of purchase, current customers vs. non-customers, retailers visited, and others. 

4. Details for Feasibility

This section helps us determine the feasibility of your audience. Please fill in as much detail as you can to help us gauge how feasible an audience is, as this will impact how long it will take to complete the research.

5. Submitting your request

Once all fields are completed:

  • Review your information to ensure accuracy.
  • Click Submit Request to send it for review.
  • You will receive a confirmation email with a summary of your request.

What Happens After You Request a Custom Audience

Our dedicated team of audience experts are here to support you every step of the way. Once you submit your request, we’ll carefully review it, assess feasibility, and recommend the most suitable audience to meet your research needs. The process will take about 24-48 hours. Here’s what the process will look like once you submit your request:

  1. Initial Review & Feasibility Check – Our team will assess your request and confirm feasibility. If we need additional details, we’ll reach out to ensure the best outcome.
  2. Draft Audience Creation – Our audience experts build a first draft of the audience based on your specifications.
  3. Approval Process – You receive the draft for review. If any changes are needed, you can request modifications before final approval.
  4. Final steps – Once approved, we program the audience to your account and notify you via email as soon as it’s available on the platform.

Need More Help?

If you have additional technical questions or encounter issues, please use the on-platform support form to contact our Support team for assistance. For more information read the help page here.

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