About Online Surveys

Getting Started

The Big Questions

You may ask yourself where to begin when starting to design an online survey. The first question should always be "What's the point you're trying to prove or disprove, or the question you're trying to answer". 

Identify Your Audience

Are you gathering input from your existing clients, perspective clients or the general public? Understanding the audience goes along way towards understanding the best method to reach your demographic.

Picking the Proper Time 

According to industry research, Monday is the clearly the best day to get the highest response rate for Business-to-Business (B2B) surveys, For Buiness-to-Consumer (B2C) there is not a single best day to send out: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays all lead to a relative high response rates and Thursdays and Sundays can be avoided.

Public or Private Online Surveys

A survey can be either private or public. A public survey can be responded by any user by clicking on it. A private survey can be responded to only through a valid unique survey URL.

Anonymous Survey

An anonymous survey is used to get feedback from your guests, clients and/or employees  No user identifiable data is recorded for the responses.

Non-Anonymous Survey

A non-anonymous survey allows survey administrators to know who is giving feedback and what feedback he/she is giving. In this survey type, the  username (if user is logged into the survey), along with the IP address and country details are recorded. Please note that an INFORMATION DISCLOSURE notice is displayed that will let the respondents know about the survey type before they respond to the survey. 

Preventing a user from taking a survey multiple times

There are several methods available to ensure your survey results are based on unique responses from unique individuals. On each survey we have the opportunity to place a restriction type, or multiple restriction types, on the survey to restrict users from taking survey multiple times.

Cookies

Using this method you can prevent users from taking survey multiple times by using cookies stored on user browser. However, users can clear their browser cookies and take survey again.

IP Address

This method is useful in case users are using static IP addresses. However it is not effective if they use dynamic ip addresses as they can always reset the router, for example, and take it again. This method will not work for anonymous surveys as there is no IP address will be recorded.

Username

If your survey respondents are registered users, this is the most effective way to restrict the duplicate responses. The survey will always verify username registered against the already taken responses. This method will not work for anonymous surveys as there is no user id will be recorded.

Other Methods

• Manually Invite Guests - Send unique survey urls manually (like through email). Unique urls are one time valid urls.
• Send Invitations from the Survey - Send invitation to users by creating contact groups and/or registered user groups.

Recommended Methodology

The Likert Scale is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research. The Likert Scale is a five (or seven) point scale which is used to allow the individual to express how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement. Likert Scales have the advantage that they do not expect a simple yes / no answer from the respondent, but rather allow for degrees of opinion, and even no opinion at all.  Therefore quantitative data is obtained, which means that the data can be analyzed with relative ease.

Next Steps

Contact us to discuss your first survey and where to go from here.