Buying Responses with SurveyMonkey Audience
If you don’t have your own list of survey-takers to get the feedback you need, you can buy responses through SurveyMonkey Audience using the Target Audience collector.
1. Create your survey following our design guidelines
2. Choose your audience and buy responses
3. Watch the responses roll in and analyze your results
You can buy responses in countries where we offer SurveyMonkey, however accounts in certain billing countries can't buy SurveyMonkey Audience due to technical limitations.
If you have data stored in our European Data Center, SurveyMonkey Audience isn't available. You can see if this applies to you by checking your Account Details.
SurveyMonkey Audience orders are one-time purchases that you can make regardless of plan type. These orders aren't included in the cost of your plan subscription, and you don't need to upgrade your plan to use them.
If you have the free (Basic) plan and buy responses using SurveyMonkey Audience, you get access to premium features from our paid plans. These premium features are only available on surveys you launch with Audience–if you want to use the features on additional surveys, you’ll need to upgrade your plan. When you are on a paid plan, you will have access to the paid features of that plan.
| Design Features | Analyze Features |
| Add up to 80 questions | View unlimited responses |
| Remove the survey footer | Exports (PDF, PPT, XLS, CSV, and SPSS) |
| Question skip logic | Create unlimited rules |
| Page skip logic | Word cloud |
| Question randomization | Tag responses |
| A/B test question types | Password protect Shared Data Pages and Results Dashboards |
| Advanced piping | Print survey PDFs |
| Advanced branching | Crosstab reports |
| Block randomization | |
| Custom variables | |
| Carry forward responses | |
| Multilingual surveys | |
| Custom and Premium themes | |
| Hide the survey title | |
| Add a logo |
Our panels are representative of a diverse online population that voluntarily joined a program to take surveys.
When you choose the United States as your country, you're buying responses from our Contribute or Rewards panel. When you choose a country other than the United States, you're buying responses from our global panel.
SurveyMonkey Contribute panelists take surveys for charity and a chance to win a sweepstakes prize.
Rewards panelists earn credits for completing surveys which they can redeem for gift cards or donate to charity.
All panelists share demographic info about themselves like gender, age, and region, and other targeting attributes you might be interested in, like cell phone usage or job type.
We balance Contribute and Rewards panels according to census data of age and gender.
Global panelists are managed by our trusted partners—this means respondent quality and activity must meet a satisfactory level, otherwise panelists are removed from the program.
While our global panel doesn't automatically balance according to age or gender, you can target specific regions within countries and choose the distribution of responses you want from each region, age-range, and gender you select.
TIP! Choose your global audience from any of these supported countries.
Create your survey in SurveyMonkey and follow our SurveyMonkey Audience design guidelines to make sure your order’s a success.
Your survey results automatically include each survey-taker's age-range, gender, and type of device used to take the survey. Plus, if you purchased Contribute or Rewards responses, we also include each survey-taker's annual household income and region.
If you want additional demographic info, include questions in your survey to gather this info. You can add pre-written questions from the Demographics category in our Question Bank.
Editing the survey design after you buy responses can cause confuse survey-takers, create issues in your survey results, and may cause your order to pause. When a live survey is edited, people taking the survey looped back to the start of the survey, and their results may not match the results of your original survey.
Your survey should be in English if you're buying responses from our Contribute and Rewards panel.
If you're buying a global panel, your survey should be in a supported language for the country you're targeting. For example, if you're targeting an audience in Belgium, your survey needs to be in Dutch or French. Here are some tips for creating multilingual surveys.
If you're part of an Enterprise team, you may use Budgets to manage Audience Credits.
To buy responses:
Once you complete your payment, we email a standard survey invitation to a random group of survey-takers who match your targeting options. It's not possible to customize the invitation email and you can't edit your order or change your targeting options after purchase.
To target different demographics or get additional responses, you can create multiple Target Audience collectors. Also, you can send your survey to your own list of survey-takers using other collector types, like a Web Link or Email Invitation.
Exclude any panelists who have taken surveys you've launched in the past 100 days on our Contribute and Rewards panel. Simply create a new Target Audience collector for the same survey to apply the exclusions.
To prevent previous respondents from taking your current survey, toggle on the Exclusions option and select the surveys that you need excluded on the Audience calculator page. Learn more.
The total cost of your order is broken down in Your Estimate on the right side of your Target Audience collector. Your Estimate includes the number of complete responses you need multiplied by the price per response.
Price per response depends on:
Any applicable taxes will be added on the checkout page.
Get a Quote View all our targeting options and get an estimated quote for buying responses on the Audience preview page.
After you purchase is completed, you can monitor the status of your order, see how many responses you have, and view your estimated completion date in the Target Audience Collector in the Collect Responses section of your survey.
To view your responses, go to the Analyze Results section of your survey. There are lots of ways to analyze your data:
You can create rules to break down your results by demographic info or collector.
We include demographic info as questions at the end of your survey results—filter your results by question to compare your results by demographic.
Or, if you created multiple Target Audience collectors for a single survey, you can filter your results by collector.
In the Individual Responses tab of your survey results, you'll find each person's response status.
| Status | Description | How you're charged |
| Complete(Finished) | Survey-takers who answered all required questions they saw, reached the end of the survey, and clicked the Done button.A survey-taker with a complete response may have skipped required questions due to logic or skipped questions that weren't required. | You're charged for the number of complete responses you ordered.Occasionally, you may collect more responses than you requested—we give you those extra responses for free. |
| Disqualified | Survey-takers who answered all required questions they saw but were disqualified by logic in the survey design.Disqualified responses don't count towards the total number of complete responses you ordered, but they do count towards the number of survey-takers we send the survey to (based on your qualification rate) and they appear in your survey results. | You're not charged separately for disqualified responses. When you use disqualification logic, you select a qualification rate, which affects the price per response. |
| Incomplete (Unfinished) | Survey-takers who started the survey but abandoned or left the survey on their own before completing it.Incomplete responses don't count towards the total number of complete responses you ordered, but these responses still appear in your survey results. | You're not charged for incomplete responses. |
We automatically pause orders that have a higher than average abandon rate or language disparity. High abandon rate (or low response rate) means many survey-takers exit or leave your survey after starting it. If your order is paused, an Audience specialist will email the account email address with survey recommendations and give you an opportunity to make changes so you can improve your data quality.
Your order may be paused if a survey is doesn't follow our design guidelines or if you edit a live survey. Complicated Matrix questions, long or unclear introductions, and consent statements can cause survey-takers to abandon a survey. Survey-takers may also abandon your survey if they feel it isn't relevant to them, so it's important you're targeting the right people.
We can't reactivate an order if it's paused a second time. This is to ensure that you're receiving quality data and that our survey-takers continue to receive surveys that are relevant to them.
Beta feature: Responses Quality automation is currently available to some customers purchasing responses.
Response Quality automation uses machine learning to scan your survey results, flag poor-quality responses, and delete and replace the flagged responses with new complete responses.