Our Managed Research service allows researchers to create and manage complex studies with the help of a project manager, typically when targeting hard-to-reach samples. Frequently Asked Questions regarding this process are below.
Where are Participants Sourced From?
Our sources for respondents are the same whether opting for DIY or Managed Research services for data collection. Participants can be sourced from our proprietary Connect platform, or our Prime Panels network of respondents. These platforms are separate from each other with little to no overlap between participants. Project managers will evaluate project requests on a case-by-case basis to determine which platform is best. For example, longer and interactive studies would need to use Connect. Connect boasts an 80%+ retention rate for longitudinal studies. For niche audiences, or international populations, Prime Panels would be better suited. Some other generalized use cases are laid out below for each.
Connect:
- Studies exceeding 25 minutes in length
- Longitudinal studies (requiring multiple waves, follow-ups, dyadic studies, etc.).
- Reserved exclusively for English speaking nations (CA, AUS, UK, USA), mostly the USA.
- More generalized targeting (gen pop)
Prime Panels:
- Studies with incidence rates of 30% or less
- Census match studies
- Geo specific studies (targeting specific zip codes, counties, states, etc.)
- Studies with high levels of stratification (i.e. more than 4 quotas)
- Very specific, hard-to-reach demographic requirements (e.g. CEO’s, medical professionals, etc.)
- One-time surveys
- Studies exceeding 25 minutes in length
- Longitudinal studies (requiring multiple waves, follow-ups, dyadic studies, etc.).
- Reserved primarily for participants within the United States
- More generalized targeting (gen pop)
Our Prime Panels source was created to maximize respondent pools eligible to participate in your studies. We’ve created relationships with hundreds of sources and tested them for data quality, consistency, and feasibility. Each project has a tailored group of panels based on your target, metrics, and needs. The sources involved change with each project, and each respondent goes through our Sentry data quality system (see “Key Factors Behind Cloud Research’s High Data Quality” section below for more on our Sentry quality control tool) immediately before entering your study. Additionally, by aggregating across multiple sources, we eliminate the risks of bias and feasibility limitations of single-source research. Connect is CloudResearch’s hand curated panel, where respondents are verified by CloudResearch staff before being accepted to participate on the panel. We’re working to have 100% of the platform stripe verified, ensuring real, high-quality respondents are the only ones participating in clients’ surveys.
Also, CloudResearch built our MTurk Toolkit, by rigorously vetting the MTurk population using a database of over one billion data points, tracking 300,000 participants for data quality and consistency. The platform curates an ‘Approved List’ of pre-profiled, high-quality respondents, enabling researchers to conduct studies that were previously difficult or impossible on MTurk. This list mirrors the demographic diversity of the broader MTurk pool, ensuring access to reliable participants across all groups.
Beyond quality control, CloudResearch has anonymously profiled participants across hundreds of demographic and cognitive variables, allowing precise targeting without compromising data integrity. As the only platform offering access to this highly vetted MTurk subgroup, CloudResearch supports complex research projects, intensive longitudinal studies, and studies requiring highly specific samples.
This service is available through our DIY platform, Managed Research service, or API.
How are Participants Compensated?
With Prime Panels, compensation for participants varies depending on the platform used. Different platforms have unique methods of incentivizing participation, such as donations to charities, gift cards, or reward points. As a result, we cannot specify an exact payment amount for participants.
Most market research platforms allow participants to choose their preferred form of compensation. This process is similar to platforms like Mechanical Turk and our own Connect, where participants voluntarily engage in studies in exchange for rewards they find fair.
Platforms with Defined Compensation Amounts
While most platforms do not disclose specific compensation amounts, Connect and certain micro-task platforms do. Studies conducted through Connect provide exact participant payments since these platforms advertise specific earnings per study. However, it’s important to recognize that micro-task and market research platforms differ in participant culture, motivation, and expectations.
Compensation Management and Pricing
The quoted price ensures that providers can recruit the required sample size while offering rewards that participants find worthwhile. Compensation is managed within each provider’s platform, ensuring participants receive their incentives based on the respective system’s policies.
Recommended Consent Form Language
To align with ethical guidelines, Prime Panels users typically include the following IRB-approved language in their consent forms:
"Upon completion of the study, you will receive compensation in the amount that you have agreed to with the platform through which you entered this survey."
Bonus Compensation Option
Self-service Prime Panels does not support bonusing or setting participant compensation. For researchers requiring a set compensation amount, we offer an optional Amazon gift card bonus for participants who opt in via email. Not all participants will choose to opt in, and an opt-out option must be provided to comply with Personal Identifiable Information (PII) regulations. Bonus payments are an additional cost beyond the base sample quote provided.
How are Participants Invited and Recruited on Prime Panels?
Recruitment methods for Prime Panels vary depending on where participants enter the study. Prime Panels is composed of hundreds of individual panel providers, each with its own approach to reaching respondents. Some suppliers send direct email invitations, while others list available surveys on a central hub website.
To maintain neutrality and avoid biasing responses, we set external survey names to generic titles before participants complete the screening questions. Examples include "Psychology Survey," "New Survey!," or "We Need Your Opinions!" These names are typically accompanied by the estimated survey length and incentive details.
Example of a Supplier Invitation:
"There is a new study you qualify for! Earn up to X dollars."
In summary, participants are invited to take the survey with information about the estimated duration and compensation. The incentive amount may vary by supplier. For more details, please refer to our article here.
For Connect, the study title and description are set by the researcher and displayed to participants before they enter the survey.
What is the Key Factor to CloudResearch's High Data Quality?
Before participants enter a survey on Prime Panels or sign up for the Connect platform (and continuously while they are on the site), they pass through a proprietary data quality tool called Sentry. You can learn more about Sentry here.
How Sentry Works
Participants who pass through Sentry undergo a series of behavioral measurements designed to identify those who are attentive and engaged. Sentry also detects and mitigates fraud at the technical level with features such as CAPTCHA and device fingerprinting. Additionally, it enhances the quality of responses to open-ended questions, which are often a challenge in online research.
Sentry in Action
Here’s a comparison of responses from participants who failed Sentry versus those who passed:
For a deeper dive into Sentry’s effectiveness, you can explore comparative research here, which evaluates Sentry’s performance against published CDC data and highlights some significant findings.
How do you Determine Your Census Targets?
We source our census target data directly from the Census Bureau’s online resources to ensure demographic benchmarks are accurate and up to date. To ensure your final dataset aligns with your specific research needs, we strongly recommend providing your project manager with the exact quotas you require before data collection begins, even if they follow standard representative sampling. Additionally, setting these quotas up within your survey can further help maintain consistency—see our helpful guide.
While census targets provide a useful benchmark, you also have the flexibility to set quotas tailored to your study’s specific objectives. For B2B samples, geographically specific sampling, or studies with a low incidence rate (e.g., certain medical conditions or parents of infants), we suggest allowing all eligible respondents to participate rather than strictly enforcing census balancing. This approach helps maintain a sufficient sample size while still meeting the core objectives of your study.
Why/How do I Need to Setup Quotas?
In-survey quotas are important for several reasons:
- Real-time Monitoring – Setting quotas within your survey allows you to track data collection progress instantly, eliminating the need to contact us for updates.
- Preventing Oversampling – Quotas help control the distribution of participants within your study. While we can regulate the total number of participants entering your study, we cannot control participant behavior once they begin. Factors such as screen-outs, drop-offs, or inactivity can impact completion rates, making in-survey quota management the most reliable approach.
If you’re setting up your quotas in Qualtrics, here is a helpful guide.
Why Shouldn’t you Allow Participants to Skip Questions and why Shouldn’t I Reject Participants who Skipped Questions?
Please note that we are obligated to approve participants who provide quality data and complete the survey as permitted by the programming. If a participant chooses to skip many of the questions and this is allowed by the survey programming, we are required to approve and charge you for them since they completed the survey fairly. If you have essential questions that need to be answered, we recommend enabling a forced response in your survey programming.
Rejections should occur in cases where data quality is low. For example, if a participant provides a poor written response, straight-lines, or fails an attention check, we recommend rejecting them.
What Demographic Info Can You Provide me With When Targeting Participants?
With Prime Panels, we ask clients to collect any relevant demographic information they’re interested in knowing within their survey. Including a “demographics” section in one’s survey, either at the beginning or end, is a commonly accepted practice. While we’re using pre-profiled, demographic information to recruit respondents based on the specifics of any given project, matching individual demographics to individual participants is a tedious process, which will incur the client additional costs. Prime Panels being an aggregation of hundreds of individual online research panels, this information is available, but not easily accessible.
Additionally, collecting this information within one’s survey ensures it’s up to date and accurate at the time respondents are participating (this is particularly relevant for variable demographic information (think education and income levels, location, etc.)). If a respondent has moved, gained a higher education or income level since signing up to participate in online research, this new information may not be reflected in their panel profiles.
With Connect, we would be able to provide you with demographic information matched up to participant's Connect IDs. Connect being a proprietary source for CloudResearch, this information is much more easily accessible.
Are There Publications Available That Used CloudResearch for Data Collection?
Here are some peer-reviewed papers that have used our Prime Panels sample:
Nicotine and Tobacco Research: https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/22/7/1131/5583890
Clinical Gerontologist: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07317115.2020.1751765?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002210311830146X
Personality and Individual Differences: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886920302786
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (income stratified sample): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-52741-002
To check out some papers that have used Connect please follow this link here.
How Does Connect Compare to Prime Panels?
- Available participants - Connect has over 50k active participants in a month coming from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, while Prime Panels has 40-50 million people worldwide. Connect is reserved almost entirely for English language surveys (given the available countries previously listed). Prime Panels can sample surveys in a country’s given language (a French language survey in France, for example).
- Demographic representativeness - Both Connect and Prime Panels are opt-in panels, meaning participants choose to join the platform. . Both platforms allow for Census matched targeting. People on Prime Panels tend to be older, and more conservative, whereas Connect leans liberal and younger.
- Participant compensation - On Connect participants are paid an hourly wage, determined by clients. Connect is an open market where the compensation offered for a study affects who is likely to take it, and how fast data collection occurs. Site minimum compensation of $7.50/hour and baseline of $10.00/hour are required/encouraged. Using Prime Panels, we aren't able to specify the exact payment amount. This is because different platforms have different ways of incentivizing participation. For example, some platforms give to the participants’ charity of choice. Other platforms give gift cards or rewards points. We therefore have no way of quantifying exactly how much participants would be compensated. The overall process of the market research platforms is similar to Connect, in that there are online participants who engage in studies for various rewards. The Prime Panels price quoted to you is the price that will ensure the providers send the desired sample in a manner that participants feel the reward offered is worth their time. The providers will then handle the participant compensation on their platforms. The language that Prime Panels users typically use in their consent forms (which has been approved by their IRB departments) is: "Upon completion of the study, you will receive compensation in the amount that you have agreed to with the platform through which you entered this survey."
- Participant expectations - Due to the motivation and incentives people have to participate in research, Connect and Prime Panels participants have different expectations for what a study should entail. Connect is more of a micro-task platform, where respondents are more use to more involved research. On Connect you can get participants to engage in tasks that last hours, or conduct extensive longitudinal studies. Prime Panels is aggregating hundreds of traditional online research panels. With Prime Panels, participants begin to drop out of studies that go beyond 25 minutes, and it is difficult to run longitudinal, dyadic, interactive, and video/interview studies.
What Does CloudResearch Uniquely Offer that Other Platforms May Not?
CloudResearch was born out of academia with two main objectives: to increase the breadth of potential research participants and to make online data quality on par with any other methodology. Between our premier participant platform, Connect, and Prime Panels, we have access to millions of respondents that can meet nearly any research target. Our data quality solutions on all platforms remove bots, speedsters, fraudsters, and bad actors that have become prevalent in online research. This combination of tailored solutions has allowed us to work with over 2000 academic institutions, government agencies, and Fortune 500 researchers. Additionally, our team of seasoned project managers and customer support staff are available at an email’s notice to handle clients’ comments, questions and concerns. Generally speaking, you’ll receive a response within 24 hours from one of our team members, and we do believe the people at our organization put us above and beyond others in the industry.
What Type of Access do You Have to my Data?
Most of the time, clients provide CloudResearch with a link that’s already been programed within a survey platform on their end, which is ready for distribution to respondents. In these cases, CloudResearch has zero access to your data. Data is contained on the client’s end, within the programming platform that we won’t have access to.
CloudResearch does offer survey programming and hosting services for a fee. Should clients choose to pay for Cloud Research to program their survey, we would have full access to that data. Data would be shared with clients through secure means. Data can reside in the CloudResearch systems for up to 3 years.
What Can I Put in my Methodology About How Participants
Were Recruited for my Study?
Please see our blog here which goes over how to cite us.
Can You Give an Overview of the Services CloudResearch Offers?
For an overview on the services and platforms that we provide, here are some helpful links: