By Owen Fay . Posted on July 11, 2022

Poll the People is constantly trying to give our users the best user testing platform possible. Equipped with templates, research methods, and audiences that help you achieve your research goals.

Poll the People is a usability A/B testing platform created to make decision-making faster, easier, and cheaper. We specialize in testing for marketers and designers that want to get the most out of concepts, designs, user experience, and usability.

Usability A/B testing is a human-centered process to evaluate a product, service, website, app, or other resources with real users to gain insights into their experiences. With usability A/B testing two variations of the resource are shown to a panel of users to find the option that delivers the biggest impact, achieves business goals, and drives metrics.

You must first decide what you want to test, input your design variations, and formulate a research question before you can start gathering actionable feedback from our user panel. If you aren’t familiar with these steps check out this page first.

The next and possibly most crucial stage is selecting your audience. If you are unsure of the demographics, segments, or other criteria that are accessible, selecting the audience can be difficult.

You most likely have a general notion of the audience you want to reach when creating a survey, right? But how can you choose the correct audience when there are so many ways to connect with potential respondents?

In this blog, we will cover the targeting and advanced criteria available through the Poll the People user panel.

Available Targeting and Advanced Criteria

Populations based on age, sex, income, occupation, education, etc. are known as demographics. You most likely have an idea of the geography, gender, age-range, and education levels of the people you want to test with, and we make it easy to get responses from those users.

Targeting By Age

Our user panel of over 500,000 dedicated participants ready to provide you with feedback can be segmented into different age ranges. The ranges that can be selected are:

  • 18-25
  • 25-30
  • 30-35
  • 35-40
  • 40-45
  • 55 and older

This option is not preselected, if the researcher enables advanced criteria for their test they will be able to segment by one or multiple age ranges.

Targeting by Location

A tester can focus on a certain area, such as a city or state, and get more useful information about its customers’ demands, needs, and interests.

Our platform utilizes participants, 90% from the United States and over 50,000 global participants. We offer segmentation of location in the U.S., you can select only users that are in the U.S., in one or many states, or exclude some states from the test entirely.

Allowing researchers to test based on participants’ location allows them to get accurate data and feedback from exactly the users they are looking for. Poll the People allows researchers to target users around their business or in the areas they get the most customers from, this segmentation can be effective for small businesses that focus on a region or a few states.

Targeting by Employment Industry and Status

Another advanced segmentation feature we offer is choosing your audience based on employment status and the employment industry.

You can conduct the test on a set of participants that are either employed full-time, employed part-time, or unemployed. You can also conduct user testing with users who only work in one or a few industries.

The following are some options for segmenting the employment industry:

  • Financial services
  • Healthcare
  • Software & IT
  • Media & entertainment
  • Manufacturing
  • Retail, wholesale, & distribution

For example, if you wanted to test a new ad that is targeting education professionals you might want to only test with users in the education industry.

This form of audience segmentation and advanced criteria includes a number of other employment industry options for the most accurate results possible.

Targeting by Household Income

Household income can make a difference when you are creating a product or service, your business might be targeting people with higher income with a premium product, or you might have a product that should be accessible by any income level. Your user research test should target those same users.

Our audience segmentation options allow you to divide the audience into 5 different income levels, but you can select multiple if you want a wider range of responses. The segmentation options are:

  • not more than $25,000
  • $25,000 to $50,000
  • $50,000 to $75,000
  • $75,000 to $100,000
  • $100,000 or above

Household income targeting can be an effective segmentation option, your business will get more accurate data on the users you expect to purchase your product or use your service.

Targeting by Level of Education

Your business or brand might be targeting people that have college degrees or even higher levels of education, your user testing platform should be able to do that too.

Three different education requirements are provided by Poll the People to its users.

  • High school diploma
  • Bachelors degree
  • Graduate degree

These segmentation options can be helpful when conducting user research, a combination of the level of education and some of the other advanced criteria can help you understand your potential users on a higher level.

Targeting by Marital and Parenthood Status

If your business is targeting people that are parents, married, divorced, or single, you can create an audience of exactly those users with Poll the People. We allow users to segment their audience by those with or without children, users that have been married, are married, or never have been.

Marital status and parental status can be powerful segmentation options if your product is for young children, couples, or even singles, if you want to get feedback from only users in one of these segments, we make that process easy.

Conclusion

Our audience segmentation offers much more than what we’ve listed in this blog, including job function, military experience, assets owned, primary news source, and more.

Getting to know your users on a higher level can help to advance and grow a business, you will learn how to gear your resources toward their preferences, needs, and expectations. As most well-versed marketers know, you always have a target audience, it could be multiple demographics or just one industry. In either case, we provide fast, cost-effective, and actionable insights from whatever audience you are targeting.

While we do offer all of these segmentation and criteria options, we suggest running your first test with a general audience (no segmentation) to get the overall preferences and expectations of the user. Once you are farther down the funnel you can run more targeted tests that help you understand your target audience better.

If you want to see all of the segmentation and criteria Poll the People has to offer, start testing your resources today. Sign up for free or take a look at our examples page to see just how a test is done.

Owen Fay

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