Recommended Best Practices for using Qualaroo

Following the suggestions mentioned in this article will help you with the types of questions that can increase your response rates as well as the value of the insights you can gain.

Identify What Your Goal Is

Before you even create your first survey, try to identify which areas of the visitor experience are still in the dark to you. Are you unclear about who your highest converting visitor is? Do you have a high rate of people abandoning their shopping carts with product in them? Are you looking to uncover why certain landing pages have a high bounce rate?

This process defines how you determine your goal for using Qualaroo. Once you can determine your goal, you can start thinking about which question to ask and what areas to focus on.

Here are some recommended questions for different goal types.

• Purpose of Visit: What did you come to this site to do today?
• Uncover Issues: Is there anything preventing you from signing up at this point?
• Polite Sign Up Prompts: Do you have any questions before starting a free 30-day trial?
• Page Level Intent: What were you hoping to find on this page?
• Segment Differences: Which of the following best describes you?
• Qualify Buyers: If you did not purchase today, can you tell us why not?
• Pages with a high bounce rate: What did you expect to find on this page?
• Net Promoter Score: How likely are you to recommend our service to a friend or colleague?
• Voice of the Customer: How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use our product? 

Click here to see a comprehensive list of recommended questions

Ready to start on your survey? Check out our "Creating a Survey" section in the "Getting Started" area.

Identify the Target Audience

Qualaroo is great at collecting insights that are spontaneous and 'in the moment'. The best response rates come from questions that pop-up for the right audience at the right time. You can't beat this combo. Even getting one of these right will give your survey a significantly higher response rate.

We’d also like to remind you to be courteous of your visitors' sessions. Nobody likes getting bombarded with pop-ups. Asking the question "Did you find what you were looking for?" on the homepage after 3 seconds is probably not going to be received well.

Below are some general guidelines:

• Uncover how your visitors found out about you: Focus on visitors who came to your site via search.
• Understanding Purpose / Intent of Visit: Delay the survey by several seconds or pages.
• Uncover Missing Content: Only show the survey when someone scrolls half-way down the page, or after several minutes/pages on your site.
• Net Promoter Score / Scale of Satisfaction: Focus on returning visitors.
• Uncover Issues: Focus on browser types with lower conversion rates.
• Understand Reservations with using or purchasing a product: Only fire a survey when it looks like the visitor is about to abandon the webpage.
• Voice of the Customer: Focus on customers who are logged in.

Ready to target your survey? Check out the "Targeting your survey" area in the "Getting Started" section.

Keep it Simple

Often times we humans can make things overly-complicated when they needn't be. When it comes to surveying visitors, this can hinder us from obtaining the information we really want. Simplicity should be a key goal in your survey design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

Below are some general guidelines we recommend:

• Be short and to-the-point. While a 2-minute survey may not sound like a lot, most visitors will only respond to 1-2, maybe 3 questions. Think 10 seconds or less.
• Be concise when writing questions. We recommend reviewing our list of questions, or our template library. If you choose to write your own question, the method we always recommend is to start with what you want to say, however is comes out. Do several drafts, especially with the first question, to get it down to as few words as possible while still making sense.
• Ask 1 question, collect feedback, then ask another question. It's better to err on the side of asking too few questions, rather than too many. We’ve noticed the longer the Qualaroo survey or the more active surveys you have running at any given time, the lower the completion rate. It needs to be an iterative process so you can zero in on the information that's the most useful.
• Consider allowing visitors to opt-in. In certain circumstances, it may be beneficial to have a qualifying screen that allows visitors to opt-in to take the survey before presenting them with a question with a free-form response.

Avoid the following: 

• Ask complicated or long questions: Does your question circle around the point? Could it be considered a run on sentence? Are you using 3 sentences to describe something that could probably be answered in one sentence? 
• Have long question descriptions: Again, you want to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to grok what you're asking so they almost have a knee-jerk response. The more you make your visitors read before they have a chance to respond, the less likely they are to do so.
• Have many question screens: The more questions you pack into one survey, they lower the completion rate. 
• Overly complicated answer branching logic: This is especially true for the first few iterations of your survey. Once you upgrade to our one of our plans, we give you the option to get more creative with the branching logic to lead to different conversion points. In the beginning when you're focused on collecting feedback, keep the fancy stuff to a minimum. 

Correlate Quantitative Data

The information that comes from using a Qualaroo survey is considered qualitative - our main focus is on how visitors respond to your survey. Because of this, it is recommended that you consider tying your responses to the data in Google Analytics, Google Universal Analytics, or KISSmetrics. These options add another level of reporting that we don't offer in our own dashboard, and no set up is required - just turn this on by clicking on the “Site Settings” tab in the dashboard. Please keep in mind this option is only available to our Premium plan.

Take an Iterative Approach to Surveys

Think of your surveys as mini experiments. If something's not working, pause it, clone it and then make your changes. It’s also important to remember that in the beginning, you want to focus on the quality of the responses and try not to let the response rate distract you from that. Play with the questions you’re asking as well as the targeting until you feel that you’re starting to see responses with the most actionable data.

We outline the recommended iterative approach in this help article.

Be Smart when Running Multiple Surveys

While our product allows you to have as many active surveys as you want, we do ask that you pay special attention to which targeted groups those surveys hit. If you have more than one survey targeted at the same visitor group, consider A/B testing them with our Optimizely integration. Another method would be to choose which survey you want to run first, gather your responses, then run the next one. Many customers will build a roadmap of the surveys they want to run over the course of their subscription. 

We have made a handful of suggestions on how to avoid survey collision in this help article.

DO SOMETHING with the responses you get!

The only thing worse then not surveying your visitors is to survey them and do absolutely nothing with the information they provide. Qualaroo should be part of an ongoing strategy to learn why your visitors do what they do, whether it's for voice of the customer, conversion rate optimization, or market research. Surveys aren't just something you should do then forget about. We recommend building different questions into a regular plan of gathering visitor intelligence, and have a clear plan for how the information you collect will influence other projects within your company.