The following suggestions mentioned in this article will help you with the types of questions that can increase your response rates and the value of the insights you gain. In addition to these suggestions, our doors are always open to chat about the best ways to get the most out of Qualaroo based on your specific use case.

Identify Your Goals

Before you create your first survey, consider your current goals. A helpful way to review your goals is to reflect on what you want your result to be. Use your objectives to guide your questions and what areas to focus on.

• Assessing Find-ability: Did the user find what they were looking for when they came to your site? 
  You may ask:
  • Were you able to find what you were looking for?
  • For those who answer no: What were you looking for but could not see?

• Assessing Usability: How easy (or difficult) was the task to complete
  You may ask: 
  • Were you able to accomplish your goal today?
  • How easy or difficult was it for you to complete your task today?

• Understanding Likelihood to Recommend with Net Promoter Score
  You may ask: 
  • How likely will you recommend our company to a friend or colleague? 
  • Branching with separate follow-up questions for each detractor, passive, and promoter to learn the reason for response.

Keep it Simple!

Brevity should be a key goal in your survey design. Avoid long-winded questions and answer options.

General guidelines we recommend when writing questions for your survey:

• Be concise when writing queries. See our template library. 
• Ask one question, collect feedback, then ask another question. It's better to err on caution by asking too few questions rather than too many. 
• Consider allowing visitors to opt-in. In the circumstance of optimizing your website, it may be beneficial to have a qualifying screen that allows visitors to opt-in to take a survey. It will help define problem areas before presenting them with a question with a free-form response.

Avoid the following:

• Showing too many surveys to the same user
• Asking complicated or indirect questions
• Asking too many questions in one survey

Take an Iterative Approach to Surveys

If you want to change any wording, targeting, or anything else on your survey, please do the following before making changes:

1. Temporarily Deactivate your nudge.

2. Clone the survey from the MORE dropdown per nudge.

3. Then make your changes to the new survey.

We outline the recommended iterative approach in this help article to help optimize your response rate and quality of insights.

Where to start?

Are you confused about which answer types to use? We recommend using the radio button and single answer selection as a go-to when in doubt. You can then branch to open text for qualitative feedback by starting with the radio button.

Benchmark Heuristics

Suppose you are interested in utilizing NPS/CSAT as a benchmark heuristic with Qualaroo to understand trends over time and identify strengths/room for improvement. In that case, it is helpful to recognize a surveying interval that works best for your business goals.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood of your customers recommending your product or service to their friends, colleagues, and others in their network. The general rule of thumb with Qualaroo NPS surveys is only to ask one question with one follow-up question.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

A customer satisfaction score can be identified by how satisfied a customer is with a product or service. A scale of 1-7 or 1-5 to find the average scores among users gives an average satisfactory measurement.

Use the data you received for the responses you get!

Qualaroo should be part of an ongoing strategy to learn why your visitors do what they do, whether it's for the voice of the customer, conversion rate optimization, testing your prototype, or market research.

Recommended Best Practices for Using Qualaroo

Identify What Your Goal Is

Before you create your first survey, try to identify which areas of the visitor experience are still in the dark. Are you unclear about who your highest converting visitor is? Do you have a high rate of people abandoning their shopping carts with products 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 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.  

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 halfway 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 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 three 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, we always recommend starting 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 most useful information.
• 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 three 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, the 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 one of our, we allow you 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. These options add another level of reporting that we don't offer in our own dashboard, and no setup is required - just turn this on by clicking on the “Site Settings” tab in the dashboard.

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 and 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 the 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 having a clear plan for how the information you collect will influence other projects within your company.