In this article:
What are quotas?
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 for gender, age, and location, but are not available for Custom Targets.
How do I set up a quota?
You can set up quotas on in Audience Marketplace on both Demographic Groups and on Single-Select Screening Questions:
Quotas in Demographic Groups
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 enable quotas toggle the 'Quota' button
Edit the % amount of the Quota by typing in the box
Distribute the quotas evenly by selecting this button
If the total quota amount adds up to more than 100%, it will count as a soft quota.
Quotas in Screening Questions
To add quotas to screening questions, select the Screening Question* from the Launch view and it will bring you to this page:
To enable quotas toggle the 'Quota' button
Distribute the quotas evenly by selecting this button
Edit the % amount of the Quota by typing in the box
*Quotas are only available on Single-Select Questions
Interlocking Quotas
What are interlocking quotas?
Interlocked quotas guarantee that you will recruit people from every possible combination of your set quotas. This helps ensure an even balance of respondents. See the example below of a common use of interlocking quotas: Interlocking gender and age - this means you will get an equal amount of each gender in each age group
To interlock your quotas select the '...' in the top right and 'Interlock quota':
Select 'Add Dimensions', and choose which quotas you wish to interlock:
This will show you the breakdown of the interlocking quotas
Soft Quotas
What are Soft Quotas?
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.
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% (110% total) this would give you a range for each gender of somewhere between 45%-55%, or a 10% flex.
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%:
Partial Quotas
What are Partial Quotas?
A Partial Quota is where you only specify a quota on particular answers in the screening questions. This is a way to ensure you get a certain number of responses for a particular demographic and is useful when you are less concerned about having an equal split among all answers.
For example, if you wanted to make sure you had 25% of respondents be 18-29 and 25% be 30-44, but were happy for the older age groups to be made up unevenly:
FAQ
What is the smallest % you can have as a quota?
Quotas can not be split to be less than 3%
Can I change quotas after my study is live?
Yes! You can soften your quotas after you launch your study - just be careful, you can only make your quotas softer, and you cannot lower the quota once you have increased