ResearchDart team
The people who build and operate ResearchDart. We write about the plumbing of online sample: what breaks, what it costs, and which fixes are worth the effort. When a post touches something we sell, we say so.
Routing, screening and reconciliation
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Incidence rate, LOI and CPI: how online sample is priced, and why quotes go wrong
Three numbers set the price of almost every online sample quote. Industry benchmark data shows the first one is routinely sold higher than it turns out to be. What each number means and how to estimate it without optimism.
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Server-to-server postbacks vs browser redirects: which one should you trust?
Survey outcomes travel through the respondent's browser or directly between servers. Each channel breaks in its own way. Use redirects to move people and server calls to move money.
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Ghost completes: the reconciliation problem nobody budgets for
A ghost complete is a complete your sample platform recorded and your survey data does not contain. They are invisible until someone matches IDs, and by then the invoice has usually been approved.
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Survey redirect status codes: mapping outcomes across sample platforms
Every sample platform encodes survey outcomes its own way, and a surprising amount of reconciliation pain is just translation errors between them. Map outcomes, not numbers.
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What is a survey endlink? Complete, terminate, over quota and quality redirects
Endlinks decide what gets paid for. Most reconciliation disputes we would expect to see trace back to four of them being set up carelessly, usually in the last hour before launch.
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A survey data quality checklist for 2026: before, during and after fieldwork
The controls worth having in an online survey this year, sorted by where they run. Short on theory, specific about settings, and honest about which checks have stopped doing their job.
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Why was I screened out of a survey? Terminates, full surveys and rejected responses explained
Being turned away a few questions into a survey is frustrating, and the explanations you usually get are vague. This is what actually happened, why it happens so often, and what you can do about it.
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How to secure survey redirects with HMAC signatures
A quarter of supplier traffic still arrives on links that can be edited in the address bar. Signing redirects takes an afternoon. The one rule people break is computing the signature in the respondent's browser.
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Setting up third-party sample redirects in Qualtrics
Capture the session ID with embedded data, send each exit to the right endlink, and test every path with a sandbox session. The part most setups get wrong is the terminate branch, not the complete.
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Survey quotas and over quota: balanced samples without wasting respondents' time
Quotas are how a sample ends up looking like the population it describes. Managed carelessly, they are also the single biggest source of wasted respondent time in online research. The difference is operational, not statistical.