Profile Rank is a multi-variable ranking method. It shows 2-10 "profiles" at a time and asks participants to pick the profile that appeals to them most. Each profile shares the same categories (eg. size, color, price) but the options for each category vary by profile (eg. price could be $10, $25, or $50).

Whenever a participant picks their preferred profile, their vote is recorded and a new set of profiles will appear. The results of these votes are used to measure which categories and options are most important to people when choosing the profile they like most.

This guide covers:

By analyzing the profiles that participants have selected, OpinionX calculates two scores:

The Option Score is a number between -100 and +100 that indicates the likelihood that a profile will be picked if that specific option is displayed on it. -100 predicts it is certain it won’t be picked, +100 predicts it is certain that it will be picked.

The Category Score is the difference between the highest and lowest option scores within that category. For example, in the screenshot below, the highest score for an option in the “Brand” category is iPhone (27) and the lowest is Huawei (-56). The difference between these two scores is 83 points, which is the score for the “Brand” category.
​

This is an important nuance. While the scores for options show the relative importance each option has for participants trying to decide between profiles, the score for categories shows the degree of influence that a category has over the decision. A bigger category score isn’t always a good thing, so it’s important to look at the option scores within that category to understand how the category score is being calculated.

Looking at the visual chart for category scores is a good way to quickly interpret this nuance! Both of these scores can be displayed as a data table or a more visual horizontal bar chart.

You can use these option scores to create hypothetical profiles and estimate which one has a higher chance of being picked as the more preferred by a potential customer. For example, let’s use some scores from the smartphone conjoint results in the screenshot above:

In the above example, I put the top-ranked brand (iPhone) together with the lowest-ranked options for Memory and Price. Then I created a competing profile with the lowest-ranked brand (Huawei) but the highest-ranked Memory and Price. Huawei was so disliked by voters that this still did not even nearly give it a strong enough combined score to come close to beating the iPhone profile — the results predict that two-thirds of participants will still pick the low-spec expensive iPhone over the high-spec affordable Huawei (22-(-46) = 68% chance of selection).
​

Once you've added a Profile Rank block to your survey, you’ll see three different text input options: (i) question, (ii) category, and (iii) option. Here’s what each of these text fields look like on the final survey:

You can also add images as options during survey setup, which will appear in your survey like this:

After adding your list of categories and options, you’ll want to customize your Profile Rank block’s configuration. There are three ways you can do this:

A. Profiles per Set → How many profiles do you want to show at the same time when participants are voting? In the airline example from the screenshot, you can see that there are three profiles on screen. You can set this number to whatever you’d like, however it is recommended to pick a number between 2 and 6 (the more complex your categories/options, the lower this number should be). Note that this is set to a default of 2 for all users and can only be customized by customers on OpinionX’s Ask pricing plan or higher.
​
​B. Sets per Participant → How many times do you want each participant to vote? In the airline example, I’ve put the Sets per Participant to 8, meaning that participants will need to select their preferred “ticket” eight times before they can proceed to the next part of the survey. You can set any number you want here, regardless of whether you’re on the free version or a paid plan.
​
​C. Skip Button → I personally like using forced voting for my conjoint surveys by removing the ‘Skip’ button, however you can leave the skip button there if you want to avoid forcing participants to select profiles that they don’t actually like.

Once you’ve got your Profile Rank block ready to go, it’s time to add any other questions to your survey that you want participants to answer. You can add as many other questions to your survey as you’d like by clicking the “+ Add Block” button that floats alongside the top-right corner of the block you’re currently editing.

The three most common question types that get added to conjoint analysis surveys are:

i. Email Identify → Using OpinionX’s Identify block type, they collect participants’ emails (or name, username, ID number, etc.) so that they know who has participated so far and to prevent duplicate respondents.
​
​ii. Multiple Choice → If you want to filter and compare segments of participants later on (eg. to see the differences between high schoolers vs university students or Americans vs Europeans), the easiest way to do this is to include Multiple Choice questions in your survey that allow participants to self select which segments they belong to. Then when it comes to analysis, you’ll be able to filter and compare these groups in literally one click.
​
​iii. Text Response → Want to understand why people voted the way they did or whether your conjoint was missing any important categories/options that are important to people’s purchase decisions? Including a Text Response block to allow people to add new questions is the best way to identify gaps in your current knowledge about the topic you’re researching.

If in doubt about how to set up your other survey questions OpinionX, I recommend checking out this 90-second Getting Started video that shows exactly how to create and launch your survey. Once you’re ready to share your survey with participants, you can pick between these four distribution methods:

A. Shareable Link → Grab the generic survey link by clicking the big “Share” button in the top-right corner of your survey dashboard. You can use this link however you’d like — share it on Twitter, Reddit, or LinkedIn, put it in an email newsletter going out to all your users, or link it in a popup or banner inside your product.
​
​B. Embedded iFrame → Add your OpinionX survey as an embedded widget on any web page by using our pre-built iframe. This is how I embedded the interactive conjoint analysis survey that you saw earlier in this blog post with the lilac-colored frame!
​
​C. Email Invites → Import a list of email addresses and send each person a unique link that can only be used once. If you’re conducting a conjoint analysis study of a sensitive nature, this is the best way to make sure that people cannot complete your survey multiple times. OpinionX charges $0.10 per email sent.
​
​D. Buy Participants → If you don’t have access to a pool of potential participants, you can always use a third-party service to recruit people to complete your survey. On these recruitment services, you pay a fixed fee per participant as an incentive for them to complete your survey. I personally recommend using Prolific, as it has a high-quality audience and is very easy to set up alongside your OpinionX survey.
​

Voting on a Profile Rank question on OpinionX has specifically been designed to work on any screen size, whether a large desktop, a touchscreen tablet, a small smartphone screen, or a little embedded widget on your website.

OpinionX shows each participant a set of 2-10 profiles and asks them to pick the one they prefer most. A new set of profiles is shown each time they vote until they have reached the number you set as "Sets per Participant" during survey setup.

The same categories are shown on every profile, but the options under each category vary from profile to profile. These cards are responsive based on your screen, so on smaller screens they will stack the text to make it as easy as possible to see all the profiles at once.

You can find examples of the Raw Data and Aggregated Exports of a Profile Rank survey from OpinionX here on Google Sheets (as of July 2024).

^ Aggregated Export of a survey with a Profile Rank block. This shows the scores for all categories and options broken down by each participant (one row = one participant).

^ Raw Data export of OpinionX's Profile Rank block. Each row represents one vote cast by a participant, with the full list of options that they viewed on display. For Profile Rank surveys with 3+ profiles, there would be more "Not Selected Profile" columns on display.

Conjoint Analysis surveys are free to create on OpinionX, just like all of our survey question formats. There are some differences to the functionality available for conjoint surveys depending on which pricing plan you're on:

Specify which options should never appear alongside each other using the Prohibited Pairing feature. This customization is available to customers on the Ask tier or higher and can be accessed by enabling the "Prohibited Pairing" checkbox in the block settings menu (⚙️). Once enabled, you will see a menu appear that looks like this:

The "Tiers" here allow you to create bundles of options that are allowed to appear together. For example, in the screenshot above, the "Samsung" option will never be able to show up alongside "Airdrop" or "$1750" because these options don't appear in any of the same tiers.

When the OpinionX algorithm is building profiles for participants to vote on, each profile will randomly be assigned one of these tiers. There are no built-in restrictions for how t are tiers elected -- one tier may appear multiple times in a single comparison set or not at all. The "Prohibited Pairs" functionality simply determines which options may not appear on the same profile together. See another example here.