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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. 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

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% (110% total) this would give you a range for each gender of somewhere between 45%-55%, or a 10% 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 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.
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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: