Social media ads for survey recruitment: Performance, costs, user engagement

Online surveys mostly replaced other well-established survey data collection methods. However, online surveys often result in low response rates and face other recruitment limitations, especially when it comes to rare populations. Thus, survey researchers and practitioners increasingly consider social media platforms for recruiting participants. Although social media recruitment provides access to an untapped and diverse participant pool, there are no best-practices or protocols ensuring sound participant recruitment. In this study, we contribute to the current state of research by investigating the effects of social media ad design on ad performance (e.g., survey completions), recruitment costs (e.g., costs per survey completion), and platform user engagements (e.g., number of comments). This is done in a cross-national research setting using social media ads that were launched in Germany and the USA in 2023. Our findings show differences across ad designs and countries. Although costs per survey completion are substantially higher for the USA, ads with strongly topic-related images result in the lowest costs per survey completion in Germany and the USA. At the same time, ads with strongly topic-related images result in the highest number of comments in both countries. Finally, our study provides novel insights into the design of social media ads for online survey recruitment in a cross-national research setting and offers valuable information on their effectiveness, efficiency, and monitoring and moderating demands.