A Quick Guide to Understanding Tracking Surveys

There are many ways to conduct a market research survey. From using an online survey to target existing customers to using a snowball sampling technique to reach your target market—how you choose to manage your market research survey depends entirely on your reasons for needing it in the first place.

However, of the many survey techniques available, there is one that is often underutilised by most people: tracking surveys. In this article, we’ll be discussing exactly what tracking surveys are and what to expect from using this method.

What are tracking surveys?

A tracking survey is a survey method where a sample consisting of a number of people is selected from the same population that meets specific conditions, and the same survey content is repeated at regular intervals. It is one of the fixed-point surveys and is also called a benchmark survey or a follow-up survey.

Tracking surveys are one method you can rely on if you want to be able to see how the response of your respondents change or stay the same across a certain period of time.

It’s possible to do tracking surveys on a daily, monthly, or even annual basis. Here are some details on how to conduct tracking surveys according to the aforementioned schedules.

1. Daily tracking surveys

Daily tracking surveys are useful when you have multiple marketing initiatives. They make it easier to determine which measures have the most impact on your customers.

For example, in order to improve your brand awareness, daily tracking surveys are recommended when launching an advertising campaign through digital ads, TV commercials, and magazine adverts in the same period.

By conducting a daily tracking survey of these media channels, it is possible to figure out the best-performing marketing channel without being swayed by temporal factors.

2. Monthly tracking surveys

The monthly tracking survey schedule is suitable when trying to see the month-to-month performance of your business’ product or brand. It is an especially powerful tool for new product releases; especially if you want to measure the consumer sentiment about your product/service on a monthly basis.

When acquiring data using this tracking survey schedule, it is common not to take measures at the same time for a certain measurement period.
 

3. Annual tracking surveys

Annual tracking surveys are commonly used to survey existing brand images and brand awareness of existing products. They are often used to check for products and corporate brands with relatively stable demands.

As you can probably guess—this type of survey is not suitable for measuring the effect of launching new products or new brands that have not yet reached customers.

Summary

Tracking surveys are a great tool that many businesses often underutilise, partly because the process is slightly more complex than a one-off survey. These types of surveys require a degree more time and effort to complete, but the insights that you can glean can be far superior to the ones you get from a one-off survey.

If you’re wondering how to start creating a tracking survey for your business and would love to learn more about whether it is suitable for your business needs, contact us here: