Understanding panel integration with inca

Setting up an integration with a panel company can be a complex procedure, so let’s break it down a little before we walk through the setup.

The panel company you're working with will provide specific respondents without revealing any confidential personal data. They achieve this by assigning unique identifiers or IDs to each participant using standardised fields like id, psid, uid etc. The main purpose of the integration process is to record each participant's unique ID in inca, and then return that data to the panel company once the survey is completed.

Once the participant completes the survey, the recorded ID will be sent back to the panel company through a redirect link. Participants are redirected to the panel company’s website in order to receive compensation, and their ID included in the redirect link will be used to confirm that compensation.

During the panel company integration process, you'll send your survey's anonymous link to the panel company. They will generate a unique link for each potential respondent by appending their specific ID to the original link. Therefore, when a participant accesses the survey, they bring along their own unique data into it.

Moreover, you will receive three or four redirect links from the panel company. Every respondent who doesn't drop out the survey early should be guided back to one of these links. Depending on whether they completed the survey (Complete), got terminated because they did not qualify to take the survey (Terminate), tried to participate after your response quota was met (Quota Full), or gave low quality responses (Quality Disqualification), they should be directed back to a separate link.

Setting up REDIRECTS for panel integration

Your panel company may send you up to four redirect links to insert in your survey that correspond to different completion statuses: Complete, Terminate, Quota full and Quality disqualification.

If you don’t have the redirect links, contact the panel company. These links will be used to send the respondents back to the panel company’s website for compensation upon completing the survey.

To add the redirect links

1. Use the following redirect links from Dynata as an example.

2. Look at the end of the links. You will see one or more of the following, followed by dummy text. Like in the above example, we have &psid=xxxx. From this, we will know, for this panel company, psid is the ID parameter we should pass back to the panel company.

3. Go into the Audience tab for the project you are working on, choose Self-Provided for Audience Sourcing, then click Add a new panel in the Self-Provided Settings.

4. For the new panel, provide panel Name/Label, specify the Identifier Parameter. Please note that if there are multiple IDs required from the panel company, you may click Add more identifier parameters to add more.

5. To specify the redirect links, toggle on Enable Forced Redirects, and then paste all the relevant redirect links in. Please note that when you paste the redirect links, please don’t include any IDs as the IDs will be added automatically at the end of redirect links based on what has been specified in the ID fields. E.g., the redirect link for complete shared by Dynata is https://api.dynata.com/respondent/exit?rst=1&basic=67477&psid=xxxx, but for the field “Redirect on complete”, you only need to paste in https://api.dynata.com/respondent/exit?rst=1&basic=67477. psid will automatically be appended to the redirect link (which you can see in the blue text underneath each field), as psid is specified as Identifier Parameter for the panel.

Getting the survey links with REDIRECTS

After the study is launched, you should be able to see a button to get sharable link(s) - 

After clicking this button, you will get the live links for all the relevant panels. E.g., in this demo study, they have multiple panels, including Cint, Dynata and Logit. To get the link for Dynata, please copy the link under Dynata, and it's the LIVE link to send to the Dynata team. Please mention to them that they should be sending this link to the real participants, and it's NOT for testing purposes. If you want to test the redirects, then click Enable test mode, and use this TEST link for any testing purposes.

For redirect testing, we usually need to confirm the ID capture with panel company. To do this, go to Data Export page on the dashboard, choose the Test Mode data in the drop down for Respondent Options (Show Option Labels and Include Incomplete Respondents are chose by default), and then click to Export Data.

In the downloaded data file, please focus on the three columns TrackerID (the IDs used by the panel), Sample source (the name of the panel) and the Status (complete, termination, quota full, etc.).

Some more Advanced Features

In addition to the basic panel setup features, inca also provides some advanced features to accommodate specific requirements from different panel companies.

To enable advanced features, toggle on Show Advanced mode on the top right.

Advanced Feature 1 - Different ID parameters captured in redirect URLs

Some panel companies require ID parameters to be different in survey URL vs. redirect URLs. For example, in the survey URL, they want to append ID parameter uid, but in the redirect URLs, they want to pass back the ID parameter rid. In that case, fill in uid in Identifier Parameter field, and fill in rid in Redirect Identifier field.

Advanced Feature 2 - Toggle OFF including ID parameters in certain redirect URL

Some panel companies ONLY require passing back ID parameters in Redirect on complete, they don’t want to include ID parameters in other redirect links. In that case, toggle ON Include parameter in redirect URL for redirect on complete, while toggle OFF for other redirects.

Advanced Feature 3 - Include survey language in redirect URLs

Some panel companies require you to pass back they survey language in the redirect URL. For example, they want to pass back lang=en if the respondent selects English as the survey language and pass back lang=fr if the respondent selects French as the survey language. To do this, toggle on Mapping Language code to redirects, and specify the language parameter (lang) and language code (en/fr) for each language.