Some information about the new YouGov Profiles web app...
1. What is YouGov Profiles?
We've just launched a free-to-use app to showcase YouGov Profiles, YouGov's new segmentation and media planning tool for agencies and their brands.
Subscribers to the professional tool have full access to the YouGov Cube – our connected data vault which holds over 120,000 data points, collected from 190,000 UK YouGov members, updated on a daily basis 365 days a year.
It allows you to profile your target audience across all channels, plan creative and design a media strategy for specific campaigns with greater granularity and accuracy than ever before.
For more information, or a free trial, contact profiles@yougov.com
2. What information is this showing?
This app does not show the *typical* fan or customer. If it did, most groups would look very similar, and you wouldn't learn a lot about the specifics of particular thing.
It shows what is *particularly true* about a group. We compare the group to their natural 'comparison set' (for example, fans of Downton Abbey compared to anyone who has rated any TV shows) and see which of the thousands of datapoints most overscore in our target group. The Z score is a statistical measure of the strength of that overscoring.
For example, if something is only true of 1% of the overall population, but is true of 6% of our target group, it might score very highly (and shows you something interesting and true about that group). But it doesn't mean that it is true of all of them!
Another example: many of the football teams show a *female* character - this does not mean that most of the fans are female, but simply that compared to other football teams, there are *more* female fans than you would expect.
And the BBC iPlayer mobile app shows a woman over 60 - this means that, compared to other mobile apps, the iPlayer app is disproportionately popular among that age group (even thought the overwhelming majority of users, like all apps, will be people under 40).
3. Justin Bieber fans aren't that old!
The YouGov panel only includes adults of 18 years or older. There is no teen or child component – so what you're seeing is the profile from among the adult UK population.
4. What is that left/right dial?
Simplifying a group of people onto a left-right axis is notoriously hard. PhDs have been written on the subject! Specifically, the left/right dial shows where this group *ranks* among their comparison set in terms of the percentage of Conservative voters among the total. So it's really a measure of Conservatism.
5. Sample sizes
If the sample says says 52 people - it does *not* mean that we only surveyed 52 people. It means that, of the tens of thousands of people who took part, 52 have so far self-identified as fans or customers of that particular thing.
We include small sample sizes because they can still show you a lot about a particular group. But obviously, the larger a sample size is the more confident you can be about the correlations.
