Panel firms come together to weed out repeat respondents

Authentic Response, e-Rewards/Research Now, GMI, SSI, Toluna and uSamp are all using the Imperium Category Exclusion (ICE) tool, which identifies and blocks respondents from surveys about topics that they have already completed a survey on recently.

The firms have formed an ICE user group, which is open to any panel company, in the hope of improving online sample quality.

“While respondent providers can exclude individuals that have recently participated in a study for a specific product category, ICE helps the industry look at respondent behaviours in full to make more educated sampling decisions,” said Imperium’s founder and CEO Marshall Harrison.

SSI’s CEO Kees de Jong said the collaboration was a “major step forward” in improving quality.

Imperium also produces the Relevant ID, one of many digital fingerprinting tools which can be used by panel providers to check whether respondents are who they say they are and whether they are using multiple accounts to complete surveys.