Sample Sources

When setting up your survey, you have two options for selecting your respondent audience: you can bring your own audience (BYOA) or use Glass’s connected panel network through our API.

In the Build Survey tab, navigate to the Audience section, then open the Audience Profile. Under Select Source, you’ll see two choices:

1. Glass Survey Audience

   • This connects to our network of panel partners via API.

   • The system will dynamically bid based on the audience specifications you’ve declared (such as demographics, quotas, or incidence).

   • Panel sample is run through both our own and third-party quality checks to screen out bots/ spam respondents before they ever enter your survey.

   • This is the easiest way to reach high-quality respondents quickly without external coordination.
     

2. My Own Audience

   • Choose this option if you plan to deploy the survey to your own list or through another system (like a CRM, newsletter, or social platform).

   • You can use your unique survey link to share with your audience however you prefer.

If you’re using the Glass Survey Audience, you can take advantage of using our standard demographic questions - the first 11 questions included in every survey template – to focus your send on the audience that you want. 

By default, the system uses Inbound Census balancing to ensure your survey is deployed to a proportionate mix of respondents based on the demographics you’ve checked (for example, gender, age, or region).

Pro Tip: If you’ve set specific quotas, you should uncheck the Inbound Census box so that the system doesn’t balance proportionally - this lets you target a particular group more precisely (e.g., all females 18–34).

When you bring your own audience, you’re responsible for distributing the survey to participants.

You’ll have the ability to append one custom ID field to each respondent record. This can be used for matchback to an external database or CRM, allowing you to connect survey responses with your internal data. Please contact a Glass team member for more details.