The Targeting step is where you decide who answers your survey. It covers both halves of that question: the demographics and quotas the panel can select on, and the screening questions you ask when selection alone can't get you there.
In This Article
- The Targeting Card
- Screening Questions Live Here
- Checking Your Audience
- Changing Your Audience
- What You Won't See
The Targeting Card
Collapsed, the Targeting card shows a short summary of your audience, in Skipper's words. Expanded, it lays out each selection as a grid of labelled tiles.
Country and Languages are always there. During the Bridge beta, studies field in the United States, in English.
Beyond those, Skipper adds a tile for each criterion you've asked for or confirmed—an age range, a quota split with its groups, a balancing preset (such as US Census) and the traits it balances by, a product category, a retailer, a device requirement, or the panel you're sampling from.
The card is read-only. It shows you the audience; it doesn't let you edit it in place. To change anything, ask Skipper in the conversation.
💡 Tip: Tile labels and values are Skipper's own plain-language wording. If anything reads oddly or looks like a code, ask Skipper to explain or fix that line.
Screening Questions Live Here
This is the single most useful thing to understand about targeting in Bridge.
Your screening questions—the prequalification questions a respondent answers before the survey body—are part of your audience, not your questionnaire. Whatever the panel's own demographics and tags can't express becomes a screening question. Skipper shows you every screening question in the conversation, and you confirm the exact wording here, at the Targeting step.
Each screening question is single- or multiple-choice, with at least one answer that qualifies a respondent and at least one that doesn't.
Two consequences follow, and both of them catch people out:
- They're priced as audience. Your screening questions decide how many people qualify, which feeds straight into your quote. That's why the quote comes after targeting rather than before it.
- Changing one reopens Targeting. Ask for a screener change while you're deep in the survey draft and Skipper goes back to the targeting step to make it, then re-checks your audience, re-prices, and returns to the draft. That isn't Skipper losing the thread—it's going to where those questions actually live.
The Targeting card shows your screeners as a single Screening tile: a short summary of who qualifies on each question, separated by semicolons. Remove all your screening questions and the tile disappears.
When your survey is built, the screening questions are joined onto the front of it, ahead of the body. That's why they show up in the survey preview—as their own Screening section—before the questionnaire proper begins.
Checking Your Audience
Once you confirm your screening questions, Bridge checks how many people will qualify for them. This takes a couple of minutes, and Skipper posts progress in the conversation while it runs (for example, "Checking qualification for the screening questions…").
Any change to a screening question runs the check again.
Changing Your Audience
Just ask. "Make it 25 to 54," "add a second quota group for lapsed users," "we need grocery shoppers in the last month"—Skipper translates each of these into the right mechanism, whether that's a panel selection, a quota, or a new screening question.
If your audience changes after you've been quoted, expect the quote to move with it. When the change affects who qualifies, Bridge posts a note in the conversation—"The audience changed, so its qualification rate has to be measured again before the next price."—and Skipper re-quotes before checkout, so you're not surprised when you pay.
⚠️ Note: Asking to read subgroups separately can raise your recommended sample size, because each group needs enough respondents to stand on its own. Skipper will explain any change before you accept the quote.
What You Won't See
Bridge doesn't show you a qualification rate—the share of people who pass your screening questions. It's used to price your study, but it isn't a number the cards report and it isn't something you need to manage.
If Skipper tells you an audience is too narrow to field, it usually means too few people match all your criteria and screening questions at your sample size. Ask it what would loosen the audience—it can talk through which criterion is costing you the most reach.