No pain, no gain is a common proverb expressing the idea that we must experience difficulties and challenges to achieve our goals. The same can be said for transitioning a custom tracking study from one panel partner to another.
While the process can introduce some friction within an organisation—from concerns about data quality and trend breaks to the logistics of sample management and survey redesign—making the switch can be necessary to yield higher quality data and a much more accurate and useful study. With careful planning and guidance, migrating to a new vendor can lead to a more future-ready tracking program that aligns more closely with your evolving business needs.
This article explores the key challenges businesses encounter when transitioning their tracking studies, offering practical solutions to overcome them, and highlighting the long-term benefits marketers and insights teams can expect post-transition.
Common barriers to transitioning tracking studies
It is important to recognise that transitioning a tracking study involves some practical and emotional barriers:
Practical barriers
At the practical level, changing the study or your supplier incurs costs, effort, and time for you and both your old and new suppliers. Even transitions that provide long-term cost savings typically have upfront costs to design, develop, and test the new process. In addition to the financial outlay, coordinating a supplier change can require a substantial time commitment from your team.
Additionally, transitions can cause shifts in results — especially when modifying sample sources, recruitment procedures, incentives, or questionnaire content. The look and feel of the survey and the respondent experience on different survey platforms can impact results, even if the questionnaire is unchanged. Even small adjustments can influence outcomes in unexpected ways, making it challenging to separate real changes in audience behaviour from those caused by methodological updates. This puts consistency and trendability of your data at risk.
Emotional barriers
Transitioning a tracking study to a new supplier can be an emotional process for stakeholders. The comfort of familiarity and the appeal of consistency often make it easier to stick with the status quo—even when doubts about the study’s accuracy or relevance start to surface. The current tracker may run smoothly and predictably, but if your business has evolved or the competitive landscape has shifted, clinging to old methods can hold you back. New research technologies and approaches now offer the chance to unlock richer, more actionable insights—sometimes, it’s simply time to move forward.
Another emotional barrier to transitioning a tracking study is the fear of what the change implies. Switching suppliers can impact longstanding relationships, but more importantly, it may force internal teams to confront uncomfortable truths. For example, imagine admitting to stakeholders that the KPI’s they’ve relied on for years may not have been as accurate or reliable as once believed. These conversations can be difficult, especially when previous results have been used to guide major decisions.
Still, while change may come with some short-term discomfort, it also creates a valuable opportunity to reset, improve, and build a study that better reflects today’s reality and tomorrow’s needs.
Now that you understand both the practical hurdles and emotional resistance that can come with transitioning a tracking study, the next step is knowing when a change is truly warranted.
Determining when it might be time to transition
Below are some key questions to help you evaluate whether your current tracker is still serving your needs along with guidance on how to approach answering them with clarity and confidence.
Is my tracker being underutilised? A primary consideration for determining when to transition a study is the study's utilisation within your organisation. Does your tracker deliver the necessary insights? Do people at multiple levels and functions trust and use the measures to make crucial decisions? Assessing and understanding the decisions made using brand tracking studies is critical.
Is my tracker delivering the insights I need? Another sign that it may be time to refresh your tracker is when it stops delivering the insights your business needs to grow. If stakeholders are routinely asking for data that the tracker can’t provide, or if the insights feel disconnected from the company’s evolving foals, it might be a signal to reassess.
Another key factor to consider is ROI. Are you getting value from the investment? Trackers can be a big investment, so it’s important to evaluate whether the outputs are driving actions and influencing business outcomes.
Are you happy with the survey experience? A common pitfall of trackers is that they can become bloated over time —more questions are added, but few are removed. This can create an exhausting, even boring, experience for respondents, ultimately impacting the quality of your data.
To answer this question honestly, put yourself in the shoes of the survey respondent. Have you tried taking your own survey on a mobile device? Ask yourself: Is this survey engaging? Does it flow smoothly? Would I personally want to finish it? Is it easy for me to answer these questions? If the answer is no, your respondents are likely feeling the same way.
Look at key survey performance indicators like length of interview (LOI), dropout rate, and other factors. If your LOI is creeping above 15 minutes, that’s often a sign your survey can benefit from a trim. Long, tedious trackers (especially legacy ones) tend to frustrate panellists, which can lead to lower engagement, rusher or poor-quality responses, and ultimately less reliable data. This doesn’t just affect the accuracy of your insights; it also impacts feasibility.
Additionally, a dropout rate of over 15% also suggests respondents are disengaging. Screen out and quota full rates can further reveal issues in targeting or sample alignment. All of these signs point to a need to revisit the survey experience with a critical eye.
Are you happy with your sample quality, composition, and management? One of the most critical elements of a successful tracking study is the quality of the sample. When respondents aren’t who they say they are, or when you're relying on panels with questionable quality controls, the integrity of your results begins to suffer. Over time, this can lead to a loss of confidence in the data and uncertainty about whether the findings accurately reflect your target audience.
Techniques like sample blending, phased deployment, and active field monitoring are complex and require skilled execution. Not every provider has the experience or infrastructure to do this well, which makes it important to evaluate not just your data, but how that data is being collected.
Consider conducting an audit of your tracking survey’s results. While metrics like completes, LOI, and IR are routinely shared, it’s worth going a step further and discussing any patterns or anomalies with your research partner. Sudden changes or shifts in audience composition may signal underlying issues worth exploring. If you're noticing signs of poor data quality or struggling to reach additional audiences, it may be time to reconsider your provider.
Is my tracker keeping up with the times? The survey experience can degrade with time due to changes in technology or device usage. At the same time, your questions can become dated as broader attitudes, product usage, and competitive environments evolve.
Since almost all studies face these challenges, transitioning a tracker is an opportunity for a makeover; it is a chance to give the study a new look, fresh content, and even a methodology adjustment.
Top considerations before transitioning
Transitioning a tracker is like moving homes; you must decide which belongings to take with you and what to leave behind. For trackers, these considerations se can be bucketed into several key categories: sample composition, questionnaire design, and reporting and deliverables. The Profiles team at Kantar, which builds and manages custom trackers, can play a vital role in consulting on potential study changes and helping you create an optimal survey experience for respondents, resulting in better quality, more actionable data.
Sample composition and quality
Your study objectives should determine your sample composition, that is, the profile of people included in the study. Brand tracking studies, for example, may include current customers, potential customers, or a blend of both. While defining your audience is important, maintaining consistency in your sample sources is even more critical. Inconsistent sourcing (whether due to shifting panels, recruitment methods, or blends of suppliers) can introduce variability in your data that isn’t tied to real-world changes. That’s why source transparency is essential; you need to know where your sample is coming from.
Considering data quality, the type of panel matters too. High-quality panels like LifePoints help support consistency over time. Kantar sets the global standard for sample quality due to our sample sourcing, sample quality procedures, including our sample blending practices, and the size of our panels. Each of these factors helps us draw consistent samples time after time, all while ensuring room for growth as your needs change. Our panel quality checks, double opt-in processes, and our panel members' engagement ensures we target the right people at the right time, leading to high-quality, engaged participants.
Survey design
Of course, gaining access to a high-quality sample and respondents is one thing, but presenting them with a targeted, well-crafted survey makes your tracking study shine. The Profiles team at Kantar can help you ask the questions that matter in clear, everyday language that avoids biases and confusion. Study participants must understand the questions asked to be able to answer them accurately and honestly.
It's essential to put the respondent experience first by building engaging surveys that are mobile-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to use. Depending on the questionnaire, visual elements, games, and quizzes may be used to make the survey more enticing and efficient.
Still, despite the survey enhancements you might want to make, we understand the importance of trendability, so we sometimes advise testing and sequencing enhancements over time to avoid abrupt changes.
Results
The third crucial component when transitioning a tracking study is to provide the tools and reporting you need to understand and disseminate your study results. Our dashboarding tools have been honed through our decades of tracking experience to allow you to quickly see and compare key metrics regarding your brand against your competitors, making it easy to view survey results or "double-click" into issues by brand, product, competitor, geography, or timeframe.
How to maintain consistency during a migration
Unless you opt to abandon your tracker and start a new tracking study with a different supplier, your transition process should include tools to bridge the results from one supplier to the next. The ability to compare and, as needed, adjust for differences between the old and new is critical for trending purposes and study acceptance.
Bridging requires careful alignment of study definitions, metrics, and sample frames to ensure one-to-one matches where possible and the identification of differences due to planned changes in the study.
A good practice that one might consider is running parallel studies with the old and new supplier to demonstrate the consistency of results in those parts of the study that remain unchanged, while providing a first look at the enhancements that are on the way. This can also help provide an understanding of how the change in suppliers impacts the data.
Conclusion
Even the finest tracking study can get off track, become less valuable than it was at its inception. Allowing a stagnant study to continue is seldom an option. Instead, you often need to decide whether to attempt a study revitalisation with your current provider—who may contribute to the pain—versus transitioning to another supplier.
As the global leader in brand tracking, Kantar can provide the roadmap for maintaining your trends while breathing fresh air into your study. Whether your study needs improvement in its sample composition, questionnaire design, or dashboarding, Kantar has the experience and people to strengthen, not jeopardise, your brand measurement.
Interested in learning more?
Fill out the form below to download our full guide, Custom Tracking for Business Growth that dives into the essentials of effective tracking and how it can transform your brand strategy. Or, contact Kantar today to explore how you can leverage connected data to unlock deeper value from your data.
