TL;DR: Starting on the week of September 25th, we will be showing a short survey in the banner ad slots on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange tech sites.
What is this survey about?
The survey is meant to provide better insight for customers into how users' sentiment towards the company or its products and services are affected by advertising on the Stack Exchange network. It is an optional survey, in which we'll ask some users questions about a company so we can test and measure whether their ads have had any impact on the user's perception of that brand. Not all users who see an ad will be served the survey, and we only survey users that are opted-in to targeting cookies. Responses are completely anonymous and no personal information from the respondents will be collected or stored.
Where will it be shown, and what does it look like?
We explored a few different options for conducting the survey, and ended up deciding to use the existing banner ad slots for these — meaning you'll see the ads and the banner in the same placement (though not at the same time, just to clarify). This seemed like the simplest and less disruptive solution because it uses an existing placement that users already are accustomed to for ads, and also allows us to conduct the survey on-site without needing to prompt the user to fill it in on a third-party website. Here's what it'll look like (click to see full-sized version):
What sites will this be shown on?
This survey will be shown on the following 61 sites:
- Stack Overflow
- 3D Printing
- Arduino
- Artificial Intelligence
- Ask Different
- Ask Ubuntu
- Bitcoin
- Blender
- CiviCRM
- Code Review
- Computational Science
- Computer Graphics
- Computer Science Educators
- Computer Science
- Craft CMS
- Data Science
- Database Administrators
- DevOps
- Drupal Answers
- elementary OS
- Emacs
- EOS.IO
- Ethereum
- ExpressionEngine® Answers
- Game Development
- Graphic Design
- Hardware Recommendations
- Information Security
- Internet of Things
- Iota
- Joomla
- Magento
- Monero
- Network Engineering
- Open Data
- Open Source
- Programming Puzzles & Code Golf
- Quantum Computing
- Raspberry Pi
- Retrocomputing
- Robotics
- Server Fault
- SharePoint
- Signal Processing
- Sitecore
- Software Engineering
- Software Quality Assurance & Testing
- Software Recommendations
- Stellar
- Super User
- TeX - LaTeX
- Tezos
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Tor
- Tridion
- Unix & Linux
- User Experience
- Vi and Vim
- Web Applications
- Webmasters
- WordPress Development
Why are you telling us about this? Isn't this just an ad in the usual ad placement anyway?
This survey is both a new onsite survey, and a new usage of the banner ad slot. Since the conjunction of those two factors could lead to some confusion, we thought it would be better to let folks know that we were doing it in advance.
The new survey will be going through this alpha test, which will help inform our product decisions in the future, as well as let us work out any bugs or technical issues. We will let you know about next steps for this feature by updating this post or posting a new question for it.
If you see things breaking, please report those in the usual channels, or as an answer to this post.
