As we have been growing our panel consistently over the years (we’ve almost doubled in size over the last 12 months), we are now at a point where we can use fewer panellists in Profiles, while still delivering great sample sizes.

Moving forward there will be an additional ‘activity’ quota that panellists must meet before their data is included in Profiles, so we will be moving away from including our active panellists to including our active and engaged panellists.

This will be implemented this week, and the change will be in effect from the 2021-02-21 dataset.

The benefits

While there will be a decrease in total panel size in Profiles (the new panel size included in Profiles will be c.285,000), as well as a 4.5% reduction in total number of datapoints. However, there are a number of key benefits to implementing this:

1. The average number of datapoints per panellist increases by 50%
2. This improves the ‘missingness’ of the data that is present in Profiles
3. In turn, this will improve the usability of data
4. It will improve the weighting efficiency

Maintaining a healthy panel is central to everything we do at YouGov and all our products and services. In order to maintain this, we go through recruitment drives particularly for harder to reach audiences – e.g., 18-24 year olds. In harder to reach groups, overall recruitment must account for lower engagement and higher propensity to become inactive; this drives the need to recruit a higher than nat-rep proportion of 18-24 year olds (for example) to ensure all business and client sampling needs are met. The activity filter will help provide more stability.

If you have further questions on the above please direct them to your YouGov contact.