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Quotas help ensure your audience sample specifications are met during study fielding. For instance, if your study requires higher sampling within a specific subgroup e.g. gender (male, female) or age (Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X or Boomers) so that an industry-specific consumer demographic is accurately captured then it's helpful to set up quotas to ensure your custom audience has correctly profiled respondents and hasn't over or under-sampled specific groups.

Quotas are available on standard demographics such as age, gender, region, and income, but not on custom targeting.

You can set up quotas on in Audience Marketplace on both Demographic Groups and on Single-Select Screening Questions:

To add quotas to Demographic Groups, select the Demographic Group you want to add quotas to and you will be taken to this page:

To add quotas to screening questions, select the Screening Question* from the Launch view and it will bring you to this page:

*Quotas are only available on Single-Select Questions

When using screener quotas in a weblink audience, you will need to define a completes goal by setting a Link Expiry to ensure quotas are followed. You can learn more about setting a Link Expiry through here.

Interlocked quotas guarantee that you will recruit people from every possible combination of your set quotas. This helps ensure an even balance of respondents. Quotas can be interlocked based on demographic quotas and screener quotas.

See the example below of a common use of interlocking quotas.

To interlock your quotas select the 'Interlock Quota' in the top right corner of your demographic group:

Select 'Add Dimensions', and choose which quotas you wish to interlock:

This will show you the breakdown of the interlocked quotas:

Adjust your quotas by clicking into the percentage boxes, or distribute them evenly across demographics:

The column on the right will show the quota for each distribution. This number cannot be lower than 3%.

Once you have set up your distribution to your liking, select 'Save' in the bottom right corner.

You will be able to see which questions are included in your interlocked quotas indicated by this button here:

Should you need to make changes to your quotas, simply click on this button and it will bring you to the Interlock quotas page. Here, you can edit answer options, adjust quota percentages, and add or remove questions altogether.

Once you are done making your changes, click 'Save'.

A soft quota is where the total quota adds up to more than 100%. This allows you to have a quota that is based on a range rather than a hard quota that requires all quotas to hit a particular number.
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This is very useful if you are hoping to get a mostly representative set but are okay with some flex - e.g. if you had a soft quota on gender - Male=55% & Female=55% and Other 10% (120% total) this would give you a range for both Male and Female of somewhere between 35%-75%, and other 0%-20%, or a 20% flex.
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Using soft quotas can speed up your research by making it less likely that it will get stuck waiting for responses and stopping your study from completing.

To use soft quotas, you simply need to add quotas in your audience and add quotas that have a total of over 100%:

A Partial Quota is where you set quotas on one particular group. This is a way to ensure you get a certain number of responses for a demographic but are flexible about the fallout for the rest of the groups. A partial quota is a hard quota, meaning you will get exactly the percentage you set, no more or less.
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For example, if you wanted to make sure you had 30% of respondents be 18-29 and 30% be 30-44, but are not concerned about the fallout of the older age groups, you would set partial quotas.