Profile Rank is OpinionX's conjoint analysis format — a ranking method that is specifically for when you have multiple variables that need to be ranked together. It shows 2-10 "profiles" at a time, with each profile showing a list of variable options, 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.

In this guide about OpinionX's Profile Rank question type, we cover:

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:

After setting your three text inputs, you'll have some additional ways that you can customize your Profile Rank block:

Here's more info on these optional next steps...

You must define each group as either a category or number set. Categories are the default option for all groups. Number sets are suited to things like prices, where you'll want to define the underlying numbers (eg. $30/month should just be "30") so that OpinionX's conjoint analysis reports can automatically populate.

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

After adding your question, categories and options, you’ll need to decide how these profiles will appear during voting. There are three things you can configure here:

A. Profiles per Set → How many profiles should show per voting set? The default and minimum is 2 profiles and the recommended maximum is 6 (the more complex the profiles, the fewer you should show per set). Editing this is a premium feature only available on the Ask tier or higher.
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​​B. Sets per Participant → How many times should each participant vote? Use the "Conjoint Calculator" to see our recommended number of sets per participant based on your survey design and estimated number of participants. Anyone can edit this variable, 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.

The "Conjoint Calculator" uses the formula p = (rx)/(ns) as the basis for its recommendations for your survey setup. Each letter in this formula stands for...

Longhand version: #Participants = (1000 * largest number of options in a single category) / (profiles per set * sets per participant)

Example of OpinionX's Conjoint Analysis Calculator:

Here's how you can share your survey and get your first participants:

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.
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​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!
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​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.
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​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.
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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.

Conjoint results are automatically calculated once participants complete your survey. These results are available in a number of different report formats:

The default Survey Scores format for Profile Rank is available for free to all users, regardless of which pricing plan they are on. OpinionX analyzes votes cast in a Profile Rank block and calculates two scores:

Option Score → Which options have the most influence over people's choices when they appear in a profile, generally from -100 to +100 indicating 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).

Category Score → Shows the range between the the highest and lowest scored options within a category. A bigger category score isn’t always a good thing; it’s important to look at the option scores within that category to understand the basis of its category score.

This report format is available for free to all users.

The Preference Chart format takes the same results as the Survey Scores table and presents it as a visual bar chart, grouping options from each category together in a color-coded way for easier comparison and showing the top/bottom range for category scores on a horizontal diverging bar chart. This report format is available to customers on the Analyze tier or higher.

The Scenario Simulator report lets you manually put together a set of profiles and then assumes that 1000 customers will buy one of those profiles, thereby forecasting the percentage of customers each profile would get and the revenue that each profile would therefore create. This report format is available to customers on the Analyze tier or higher.

The Ranked Concepts report creates a comprehensive ranking of every possible combination of options, helping you to identify which profiles have the highest relative preference to survey participants. This report format is available to customers on the Analyze tier or higher.

The Marginal Willingness To Pay report lets you see how much a customer would be willing to pay to unlock one specific feature (ie. option) compared to a baseline offering. For example, in the screenshot below, the baseline offering is 128GB of smartphone storage and participants on average would pay $33 extra to upgrade to a version of the same phone that offers 256GB of storage. This report will only work if your Profile Rank setup includes pricing data and it is available to customers on the Analyze tier or higher.

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.