How to improve your targeting

We know that when it comes to research, your targeting can vary from being overly broad, to extremely specific.

And while you can use our age, gender, full name and address tags to ensure you are speaking to the right respondent – there’s something else that we like to recommend to our clients:

Use information revealed in the Census, to target SA1s and SA2s (small geography blocks) where a high proportion of your ideal respondents are located.

We don’t need to get into the ins and outs of these geography levels (unless you’re intrigued, then contact the team!), but these are essentially ABS boundaries that can start as small as a block of houses and gradually increase in size.

But back to using Census data – what do we mean by this?

Client success story

A client was looking to target respondents that owned more than one motor vehicle.

This isn’t something we can sample by as standard, so we instead had another suggestion.

“The was a question in the 2021 Census about motor vehicle ownership. We could look at the ABS’ Census data and target respondents in SA1s that have the highest proportion of people with more than one motor vehicle.

“We could further filter these SA1s down to those with the highest proportion of married couples, based on the assumption that they would have a higher chance of owning multiple motor vehicles.”

This allowed our client to not only have the best possible chance of speaking to respondents that owned more than one motor vehicle, but our client also reported that they had some great success in the field.

ABS Census data is available to the public, however the SamplePages team can also do this targeting analysis for you – so get in touch!

We look forward to speaking with you soon.