Greenfield sets sights on bad respondents

UK-- Greenfield Online and European subsidiary Ciao Surveys have launched their own initiative to weed out bad respondents.

The Duplicate Response Detection (DRD) system is designed to stop panellists taking surveys more than once, by assigning them a unique ID which remains on their PC, and can detect multiple accounts. DRD forms part of Greenfield's Quality Data Program, which also covers recruitment and post-survey procedures and will be applied to all projects from now on.

Greenfield Online executive vice president Keith Price told Research that all panel providers should be offering similar safeguards as a minimum requirement.

“We're funding it internally in our expense line,” said Price. “We've made the investment based on our cost structure to fund development of the solution, and also any issues regarding the supply we deliver to the market.”

Greenfield's internal initiative comes on top of its participation in MarketTools' TrueSample programme, which checks and certifies the quality of panels by using machine fingerprinting, as well as checking panellists' details against databases.

“Strategically,” said Price, “we feel it's good for us to be part of both initiatives” (i.e. the internal quality programme and TrueSample). “They both have the same objective and that's to deliver a higher quality piece of sample.”

Price hopes the new measures will help change the atmosphere in the online research market, which has for years been marred by unanswered questions over transparency and quality.

He said: “It's giving our clients comfort and assurance, and separating ourselves from those that haven't put the technology in place to address this. This definitely will raise the bar. I believe as an industry this should just be a basic requirement. Over time everyone who wants to participate should be providing this as their minimum.

“We've had a lot of concern building over the past two to three years now. Over the next twelve months or so what this will do is create a comfort level with clients, that there are measurable statistics that can be provided in these areas.”

The author of a recent Gartner report on panel quality said the year ahead could “change the game” of online research, with moves from MarketTools, Peanut Labs and now Greenfield to tackle the issue.

Pete Comley – of the UK's Virtual Surveys – who recently compared reliance on panels to reliance on dwindling fossil fuel reserves, welcomed the quality initiatives but said industry-wide standards, rather than separate initiatives, are needed.

Author: Robert Bain

Related links:

Panel quality tools set to ‘change the online research game'

MarketTools promises to clean up panels

Peanut Labs attempts to crack the panel fraud problem