What is a Tracking Study? | Definition, Uses, and Benefits of Tracker Surveys

Successful businesses are built on creating challenging goals and objectives. It is necessary to define our desired achievements and identify the specific actions it will take to meet these goals. Often times, businesses share general, common goals among areas of profitability, customer satisfaction, community awareness, retention of employees, and so on.

What is the best way to achieve these goals? By tracking your progress and key benchmarks on a continuous basis. In other words, these areas or aspects of a business should be evaluated and compared to one another as time goes on, whether this be monthly, quarterly or yearly.

This not only helps businesses track their current progress of meeting their long term goals, but also showcases what areas of their business have improved year over year and what areas need closer attention.

What is the best way to track your objectives? A tracking study of course. Sounds pretty fitting, right? Sometimes it feels as though there is no rhyme or reason as to why our business is performing well or why it is not hitting our goals.

A tracker survey can help take the guesswork out of market fluctuations and dips in sales, by providing continuous and fresh insight into any industry or target audience.

In this blog post, our market research company will define what a tracking survey is, the uses for conducting this type of study, and the benefits of doing so.

what is a tracking study?

Tracking studies provide real-time insight into the ever-changing attitudes, behaviors, and opinions of the customers and prospects of an organization.

What is a tracking study?

Let’s face it. Nothing lasts forever – and that includes the data collected from your last market research study. The purpose of a tracking study, also referred to as a tracker survey, is to collect information over time (monthly, quarterly, yearly) by the means of generating and measuring data on an ongoing basis. This allows organizations to regularly identify trends, make comparisons to competitors, and detect warning signs early on before they make a lasting impact on the business.

The more you are able to ask for feedback from customers, prospects, or the general public, the more businesses are able to understand what marketing strategies have worked and offered the best return on investment (ROI). Tracking studies help with making important business decisions based on hard and true facts, rather than just guessing.

Regardless of what it is you are measuring, or who you are surveying, tracking studies depict a wave of changes among the market over a period of time, rather than a snapshot of a sample of people at one point in time.

What are the uses of a tracking study?

There are many reasons a business would use a tracking study, outside of only tracking baseline data.

To name a few reasons, an organization may use a tracker study to understand how buyers evolve or change (this could mean their buying patterns, habits, attitudes, demographics, etc.), measure brand perception and awareness, and learn how customer satisfaction change over time in order to clearly identify what factors of a business lead to high satisfaction or low satisfaction among their customer base.

For example, it is not just one customer satisfaction survey, rather a series of surveys in order to reach past, present, and future customers to truly understand how their opinions, habits, and emotions change throughout the year.

Even more so, if there are major problems stated by your customers, you are able to react quickly. With this type of real-time data, businesses are able to know exactly why their organization was difficult to work with or what factors didn’t meet the expectations of their customers. Understanding the major areas of improvement and acting upon them fast allow for a powerful leg up against the competition.

Another example may be for just the opposite audience – a non-customer community survey. Just as customer preferences are constantly changing, so are those of potential buyers. Surveying non-members (people in the general area or community) on a regular basis can help measure and define these preferential changes.

How likely are potential buyers to switch to a different brand? How important is price when buyers are comparing vendors? What is the awareness level among the general population of your organization? These are often the types of questions asked in a non-customer community survey.

By asking these types of questions on a more regular basis in the form of a tracker study, organizations are able to compare results from quarter one to quarter two to quarter three to quarter four and determine if their marketing efforts have at all changed the awareness or perception of their potential buyers.

How can my business benefit from a tracker survey?

A tracker survey can help answer a broad range of topics as well as specific challenges and core key performance indicators (KPIs) among an organization. Plus, taking it one step further, by executing continuous research these types of questions are able to be slightly modified to address more pertinent business matters. In other words, as the feedback evolves from a tracking study, so can the questions asked in the study.

Tracker studies offers flexibility and on-demand data unlike more long-term market research studies. For example, tracker surveys may subtly address immediate concerns like a new competitor being introduced to the market.

Also, there is no better way for a business to understand fluctuations or changes in the market than through a tracker survey. This type of research provides a constant and steady stream of fresh data to monitor progress and measure performance. In turn, tracking studies provide business with key insight into how changes they’ve made directly impact the behaviors and mindsets of their customers or prospects. A tracker study allows for organizations to measure changes and performance month-over-month or year-over-year, depending on how often your survey is distributed.

It is not a one and done study, but rather a wave of customer insights to better understand the impacts of your marketing campaigns and sales tactics. Customer feedback is hardly ever stagnate across an entire year, therefore strategies to increase customer satisfaction should be evaluated on a regular basis. Tracking studies help make this possible.

Contact Drive Research

Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team has the knowledge and tools to design a robust tracking study, to deliver real-time data for your organization fast.


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