YouGov — Bringing on the next generation

During FY20, this offering has been launched in the UK, the US and Canada, with Singapore and Australia following on in FY21. Trials have been carried out with around 100 clients and with over 40k members supplying data to date. The principle is that the client can set up quick surveys, composing their own questions or showing their own media or product concepts, then chose the target market to interrogate. Depending on the type of survey, the turnround time could be as little as one hour, with no need for any intermediation from editors or data analysts.

While there are other products available, such as Surveymonkey or Google Surveys, which may be cheaper, the advantages of YouGov Direct include the ability to incorporate a call to action (an example might be a button linking to the client website) and the possibility of recontacting respondents. Response fraud, a recognised industry issue, is effectively negated by the requirement for members to have registered their banking details in order to receive payment. Projects carried out to date have been as small as $100-200, up to the largest which entailed a commitment of over $50k. Pricing is determined from a combination of:

Clients are restricted to internal usage of the data obtained, which should avoid misleading marketing statements purporting to come from survey data.

YouGov Direct members may be recruited from existing panel or from visitors to the group’s websites and apps. From their perspective, their user interface will allow them to see which organisations are approaching them and for what purpose, so that it is an active decision to participate, so side-stepping privacy issues. The interaction is logged in a blockchain, which records the type of data transferred rather than the data itself. There is therefore a high degree of transparency on both sides. Within the development period, 76% of members who were active a year ago round the launch period still are involved and 88% of those retargeted will respond within 24 hours, demonstrating a high degree of continuing engagement.

There is an obvious question as to whether this offering is cannibalistic to the existing YouGov offering. We conclude that this likely to be true only at the margin. More likely that it extends the potential client market and provides a lower cost entry point, from which the more sophisticated products and services can be sold.

The obvious extension of this service is for ad testing. Although this is a very small part of overall advertising budgets, it provides the potential for clients to avoid expensive mistakes and to improve the ROI on campaigns that go ahead. This capability on the YouGov Direct platform is under development.

While Direct as a standalone proposition has value, the step change in the intrinsic value would be integration with other elements, particularly the YouGov Profiles offering, which ties characteristics and preferences with brands. Direct will continue to attract different individuals as contributors who may not be interested in participating in the more traditional panel activities. Brand owners and other clients would be best served by having access to both.

YouGov Chat aims to attract a much wider demographic that will then agree to share their opinions and data. It is effectively a private chat service, built around a range of ‘passion points’ used to engage an audience, which might be based on sports allegiances, politics, music, fashion, health etc. There are currently around ten of these channels operational, with over 300k members and 2.2m active conversations.

The chat itself is curated by professional content editors, with chatbots continuing the engagement and able to drive the content agenda from submitted comments. With no peer-to-peer interaction, this concept allows people to express opinions without trolling or abuse prevalent on platforms such as Twitter. However, with aggregated content, it allows a user to see how they are positioned vis-à-vis others in the themed chat, allowing for some sense of community.

Unlike other data harvesting within the group this is unpaid to the participant. They are primarily being recruited on social channels, when interacting with YouGov content on particular topics. As, with YouGov’s main panellists, the sense that that individual’s opinion is of value to the debate is a key driver to participate. Financial incentives to participate are rarely paramount.

This approach has been particularly successful to date in attracting a younger demographic.

Unlike YouGov Direct, Chat is not currently a direct revenue earner. Its true value is as a recruitment tool into YouGov Direct, with which it was integrated in September. CPA (cost per user acquisition) has been between 20p and 75p, depending on the topic and the user type that is being targeted. For comparative purposes, at a group level, spend on panel recruitment in FY20 was £8.9m and an aggregate increase for the year was 3.09m panellists, giving a rough net CPA of £2.88. Panel retention in FY20 was 69%, which is good in industry terms, with panellists kept engaged, at least in part, through seeing press coverage of surveys in which they have participated.

The current position is that there is an internal team running large, core chat channels. Possible future developments include allowing third parties to use the platform to run their own chat to better engage with their own audiences and facilitating a wider network of bloggers on niche topics. Obviously, there will need to be infrastructure to police the content and avoid potential reputational issues.

The ultimate audience is being thought of in terms of tens of millions of users.

This is a more recently launched concept. Again, it harks back to the notion of individuals as the owners of their own data, who should be able to determine how it is used and derive value from that. For this element, the relevant data is the large data sets held by organisations on the individual, be that streaming platforms, retailers, financial institutions, health providers etc.

In an increasing number of jurisdictions, individuals can request the data that those organisations hold on them. YouGov Safe should allow those individuals to monetise their data through uploading onto the Safe platform, through a browser extension or, in due course, by web and mobile apps. The user the grants the relevant permissions for aggregated information to be able to be accessed by third parties. Only closed data sets would be aggregated, on an encrypted and anonymized basis. Members can obtain insights about themselves and their online behaviour, including how it might change over time, possibly over time interwoven with recommendations based on history.

The clients will pay for aggregated data. There would be a possibility of individuals being targeted to see if they wished to participate in ad-testing or surveys within Direct, based on the information that has been provided within Safe.

YouGov Safe is a mechanism for ingesting large quantities of anonymous third-party data which will enhance the YouGov Direct model’s utility to its clients. Again, the significant commercial uplift would be in the integration, particularly the marriage of this data with the information held within YouGov Profiles, the group’s media planning and segmentation tool.