The tracking survey is an essential part of almost every market researcher’s toolkit. It helps you monitor key metrics, make better decisions, communicate insights with stakeholders. But the time and expense of traditional tracking studies starts to add up. And in a climate of shrinking budgets, they also become vulnerable to cuts.

Luckily, new technologies are helping solve this dilemma. At InCrowd, we’ve used our new MicroTracker to simplify and automate the task of excluding respondents and creating new crowds so you can stay on timelines and on budget—and stay more focused on what the insights are saying.

In fact, we’ve found that clients using MicroTracker are saving as many as three hours per survey. With surveys being deployed every week or every month, those time savings quickly add up. And with automated, aggregated reporting, the effort becomes extremely efficient.

So how do we do it? First, let me describe the problem. You know it well.

It’s the defining feature of tracking studies—asking the same group of people the same questions week over week or month over month. Because when you do, the quality of responses suffers. And you compromise your ability to see how perceptions and behaviors change over time.

There are three aspects to every tracker: survey setup, sampling, and reporting. In our experience, creating a survey every week, while repetitive, could take little time. It’s not that hard to login, recreate or duplicate a survey, and hit launch. The first time may have taken you 30 minutes. The second and subsequent times, it’s a matter of 30 seconds (if you’re using good, intuitive market research software).

The real elephant in the room is sampling, which can take up to 80 percent of project setup time. This is where the complexity and time commitment comes in. You have a set of initial survey targets. For your next survey wave, you now need to juxtapose your new targets against the old ones in the last wave or series of waves. Once you’ve done that, you then need to remove the initial set of targets from your crowd and create a new crowd without the previous respondents. The deeper you get into your tracking project, the steps involved—and hours required—pile up.

Another challenge is reporting, which gets more complicated with each wave. It can often be the most time-consuming of the survey.

InCrowd bypasses this labyrinth of steps by using advanced automation technologies in our MicroTracker, weeding out recent past respondents. We accomplish this through a smart sampling algorithm. This is a powerful feature that knows which targets you’ve already reached out to, can exclude them if you want, and quickly generate a fresh crowd for the next survey wave, all at the touch of a few buttons.

And automated, wave-over-wave analytics save dozens of hours every time, allowing researchers to focus on what’s important—drawing insights.

It’s all the benefits of tracking studies, without any of the hassle. What are you waiting for? Contact us today to learn more about how MicroTracker can help you with your next tracking project.