You're previewing your survey and you notice extra demographic or "trait" questions that you didn't add—things like age, gender, or household details. This is expected behavior, not a bug, and it won't affect your respondents' experience or your costs. Here's what's going on.
In This Article
Your Preview Reflects Panel Sourcing
aytm's preview mode lets you review your survey in Respondent, Researcher, and Ghost modes. When you preview in Respondent mode, you see the complete start-to-finish experience a respondent could encounter. The trait questions you're seeing are the ones we ask only when a respondent comes from one of our partner panels.
Our proprietary panel reaches respondents around the globe and they're already profiled, so they never see trait questions. Depending on your targeting, though, we sometimes draw from partner panels to fully fulfill your sample. Partner-panel respondents see additional trait questions so we can confirm they meet your demographic requirements before they continue.
Which Traits Are Asked—and When
Trait questions appear at different points in the survey flow depending on whether they're filtering criteria or not.
Geographic location and age are always asked first—before any of your own survey questions—because they're the baseline criteria used to match respondents to your targeting. Respondents from both partner panels and our proprietary panel see these questions.
Traits you've set as targeting or balancing criteria come next—such as gender, ethnicity, or income. These are also asked before your survey questions, so we can qualify respondents against your overall targeting and quota needs before they continue.
Any remaining trait questions—demographics that aren't part of your targeting or balancing, like household or marital status—are asked at the end, after your own survey questions, if they apply to your respondent pool. For B2B respondent pools, fewer trait questions are asked, since some demographic criteria (like marital status) don't affect professional expertise.
⚠️ Note: Trait questions do not incur additional cost and are not mixed into your own survey questions. They're added automatically for quality and targeting—you don't need to remove them.