Advertising Online Surveys on Social Media: How Your Advertisements Affect Your Study

Although the recruitment of online survey participants through paid social media advertisements is becoming increasingly common among survey researchers, we know little about how the content of advertisements influences the recruitment process. Our study systematically compares the effects of several approaches-being vague or explicit about the survey theme and offering material incentives-relying on 23 advertisements conducted in Turkey and Spain between May 2021 and June 2022, recruiting more than 30,000 respondents. Our article documents the important trade-offs that the content of an advertisement creates regarding cost and sample composition. We find that incentive-based advertisements can produce samples much closer to national population benchmarks; however, this also depends on the type of incentive. Thematic advertisements, which mention the political content of a survey, consistently return the cheapest samples, yet certain groups are overrepresented in these samples. Incentive-based advertisements also produce a generally higher response quality. We conclude our article by providing practical advice on which kind of advertisement to use, discussing the generalizability of our findings to other countries, and listing the main limitations of our study.