Online, survey research is great for collecting deep, interesting data about your audience. It’s the perfect compliment to web analytics and syndicated audience measurement and can provide benefits to everybody in your organization, from the editorial staff to the ad sales folks. However, it’s easy to get it wrong. In fact, we tend to think that most people do just that. And, depending on how it’s used, bad data can often be worse than no data.
Most of the time, problems can be traced back to sampling error. In technical terms, sampling is the act of observing a small selection from a larger population in order to learn information about the entire population. In the case of online surveys, sampling refers to how you recruit respondents …
