Customizing audience sheets

Customizing an audience sheet could be helpful when the system-provided audience sheets do not meet your fielding needs. Simply make edits to an existing audience sheet and "localize" it in your survey home by adding it directly to the survey's Sheets applet.

To get started, go to the "Home page," expand Resources, and click on Sheets. Choose any audience sheet and download it to use as a template.

Requirements

Audience sheets require these columns to be present in order to function: id, text, and percent. Additional columns can be added as needed. An example of an existing system audience sheet for standard US age groups is shown below.

Example

Editing the sheet

Suppose our client needs to combine the two older age groups shown in the standard US age groups above. First, remove the three optional columns if they are not needed — sample_code, country, and difficult. Next, delete the sixth row, and merge the upper two age bands into one single age group called  "55+." Then, combine the two corresponding percentages and edit the percent allocated (16.6% + 20.7% = 37.3%). Make sure the percentages across all rows sum up to 100%.

Once the audience sheet is ready, upload the sheet to the survey's Sheets applet.

Editing the survey code

In addition to the sheet changes, the source code must also be adjusted. First, update the list that has the same set of options as the audience sheet to reflect the changes made in the spreadsheet. Then, update the audience sheet tag's input to reference the new local sheet.

setlist: AGELIST
1. 18 to 24
2. 25 to 34
3. 35 to 44
4. 45 to 54
5. 55+

AGE. What is your age group?
type: radio
optsfrom: AGELIST

AGEQ. Age group quota
type: quotas
audience sheet: serverid.audiencesheet_55plus
optsfrom: QAGE

Audience sheets are referenced in the same way spreadsheets are referenced anywhere else in the IntelliSurvey platform. See Using spreadsheets in survey programming for more information on referencing spreadsheets.