Conducting Online Research - American Marketing Association

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Conducting Online Research


	By Allen Hogg
	Allen Hogg is a director in the research management organization of the Chicago office of TNS. He has led workshops and given presentations on online research for the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Research Association, the Advertising Research Foundation, ESOMAR, and numerous other research organizations, as well as at client companies and university venues. His writings have appeared on the pages of Marketing News, Quirk's Marketing Research Review, and the annual journal of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO).

	1. Introduction

The Internet has provided researchers new tools for collecting and disseminating both quantitative and qualitative information.

Online research can be a fast, cost-effective way to gather and analyze data for marketing decisions. Web survey capabilities make possible research that would have been almost impossible to conduct via offline methods.

Use of these new tools, however, should not imply throwing out old wisdom about good research practices. Just because the Internet makes it possible to add lots of “bells and whistles” to survey interfaces doesn’t mean it is a good idea to use them.

Likewise, it is still important to try to survey a representative sample of the population being researched. Because the Internet has not been universally adopted, this might mean it is necessary to stick with traditional offline methods, or to use a combination of online and offline techniques.

Although a number of different ways to recruit respondents for online surveys have evolved, researchers need to be aware of benefits and drawbacks of each. In particular, researchers must pay attention to concerns about “Spam” e-mail. Researchers might also need to think again about their use of incentives to reward project participants.

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2001 MarketingPower.com Inc. Contents used by permission of the author.

Table of Contents

1.	Introduction
2.	Survey Design and Reporting
3.	Generating Samples
4.	Invitations and Incentives