YouGov has launched a major innovation in British political opinion polling, together with Sky News: a daily tracker poll during the UK party conference season. Normally, we can expect nine or ten polls to be issued every month by the various agencies, so this on first impression seems like a major development which more accurately captures popular reaction to the news agenda. Certainly, the underlying methodology behind the polls is sound. A sample size of 1,000 people is surveyed over the course of an afternoon and the next morning, with the results published just hours later.

However, there are a couple of important points to bear in mind when looking at these numbers, and indeed any other polls published during the next couple of weeks:

• As with any poll, what may seem like a major shift in opinion could be within the margin of error. Based on a 95% confidence interval, the margin of error for the opposition Conservatives (who are well in the lead) is around 3.0%, and for Labour it is about 2.4% (based on their lower vote share). This means that a fairly large daily move is needed for us to know that it is statistically significant. This, of course, is not a concern for many newspapers, and increasingly the blogs, which will report the polls in a partisan fashion!

• Conference season has traditionally been the most volatile period for opinion polling in the UK. This is because one party tends to dominate the news agenda, with a disproportionate amount of coverage being given to key figures within the party. Other parties tend to struggle to break into the news agenda during this period. Note, for instance, the five point jump in the Labour share of the vote between Friday September 25 and the next poll on Monday September 28, which captured the start of the party’s conference.

All in all, though, the YouGov polls are a welcome addition to the UK polling landscape, and it will be interesting to see whether they are relaunched as we head towards the next UK general election.