USCS FAQs

How is the USCS survey administered?  

The USCS is an online survey administered through our independent panel partners who build and maintain opt-in survey panels for research purposes. .  .  Panel members are invited to opt-in to take the survey.  The survey is not Resonate branded and is not a pop up. Additional information is available in the Methodology overview.  

How are respondents selected for the survey? Do you target devices?    

In order to be eligible to take the survey, a respondent must be an adult 18 years of age or older, reside in one of the 50 U.S. states or District of Columbia and have sufficient online behavioral data present over a 90-day period.   

Once someone has taken the survey, when could they take another survey from Resonate?  

Survey respondents are not re-contacted for 90 days after they’ve completed a survey with us.  

Is every survey question asked reportable in the platform?

In general, a question in the USCS survey should have a 4-5% population incidence rate in order to be reportable in the platform. 

How frequently are vertical specific categories asked in your survey?  Most of the verticals measured in our USCS survey are fielded once a year in one of six survey waves or field periods.  Resonate is implementing significant enhancements to its data collection process beginning in 2023 where all verticals are now measured each wave.    

What characteristics are survey respondents weighted on?  

We weight on the following parameters:  

1. Age/Gender
2. Race/Ethnicity
3. Household Income
4. Census Division
5. Education
6. Presence of Children
7. Registered to Vote
8. Time Spent Online

Do you capture mobile browser/mobile app data in your behavioral database?  

We capture desktop and mobile behavior in our behavioral database.  

Do you capture search activity from our behavioral database?  

No.  

Why does the projected audience size change depending on what attributes are used in an audience definition?  

We are predicting the presence of an attribute and every attribute across our cookie jar. When OR statements are created when building an audience, the Resonate platform will first try and accomplish that by looking at waves where all “or”s are present. If the audience that creates is above the existing threshold then it will present that audience, if it isn’t then it will look at imputed data across all waves and present that audience. This doesn’t directly relate to cookie modeling.  

Are there attribute values that can not be activated? 

Yes, client will not be able to activate, license or use for data append, audiences that use Sensitive Data topics, within states that limit the use of sensitive data.   Sensitive data topics include race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, mental or physical health condition or diagnosis, sex life or sexual orientation, citizenship or immigration status, genetic data, biometric data, precise geolocation, private communications, financial information, government-issued identifiers, union membership, children’s data. 

Coming soon, where applicable, sensitive data attributes will be blocked by Resonate for activation, data enrichment and data licensing use cases for the following states: Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Nevada, Washington state, Oregon, Texas, and Montana. Additional states will be added as legislation is passed. 

What is Urbanicity and how does Resonate Define it? 

Researching and understanding regional population, economic, and other trends are often studied based on metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, as defined by counties within the US. The characterization of counties into metropolitan and non-metropolitan classifications is sometimes referred to as Urbanicity.

Resonate reports on Urbanicity based on the USDA’s Rural-Urban Continuum Codes that distinguishes metropolitan counties by the population size of their metro area, and non-metropolitan counties by degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metropolitan area. The USDA classifies counties into three metropolitan and six non-metropolitan categories with each county in the U.S. being assigned one of the 9 codes. This definitional scheme allows researchers to break county data into finer groups beyond metropolitan and non-metropolitan, particularly for the analysis of trends in non-metropolitan areas that are often related to population density and metropolitan influence.

Resonate’s reporting of Urbanicity is rooted in an understanding of the location of our survey panelists. While we do not directly report on this location, this serves as the basis through which we map the population to counties across the country. These counties are then classified against the USDA’s Rural-Urban Continuum and reported as Urbanicity within the Resonate platform.

Does Resonate Report on sample sizes? 

Resonate does not currently report on raw sample sizes. Resonate leverages a predictive methodology where we impute data for those respondents who may not have been exposed to a particular survey question. The Resonate platform leverages this imputed data when it may be required to build a particular audience, or facilitate a particular insight. Due to this dynamic use of imputed data, displaying a single sample size may be misleading in what it represents and as such we don’t display a sample size at this time.

Audience Modeling

In order to model our proprietary USCS attributes onto cookies to provide targeting and addressable insights, we must first understand the relationships between survey responses and online behavior. To do this, Resonate creates a single-source response set of survey answers and online behaviors. Online behaviors are populated through traffic partnerships spanning several million unique domains and hundreds of millions of pages, which are analyzed using advanced natural language processing techniques to identify the topic graph of each person at the attribute level.

When Resonate surveys a respondent, we screen for the presence of this cookie. If the cookie is present, we proceed with allowing the respondent to take the survey, providing us with survey responses and online behaviors for the same person (single-source sample).

For more information on audience modeling, please visit this page.