Five Guiding Principles of Good Survey Design

I’m back with some accepted best practices that I promised from my article Surveys for Fun or Profit? You may have already seen the “Top Ten Survey Best Practices” list that Christian Vanek and I delivered at a free SurveyGizmo Webinar at the end of September. If not, I encourage you to check it out. In this article I present five guiding principles of good survey design which provide a foundation for the top ten list referenced above.

1. FOCUS

The first principle for creating a good survey is FOCUS. Only by having specific objectives ahead of time, can you expect to obtain usable information from a survey. Those objectives drive the questions. In fact, every question should tie back to a specific objective.

2. CONNECTION

The second principle for creating a good survey is CONNECTION. The quality of the information you get from your survey depends how well you connect with your respondents. You can connect with your respondent by learning about those who will be taking your survey, by viewing each question from their perspective and even by talking to some potential respondents ahead of time!

3. RESPECT

The third principle for creating a good survey is RESPECT. Your survey should show respect for your respondent’s time. If you are trying to do too much, it shows and it will turn off your respondent. Make sure that you ask only relevant questions (the powerful features SurveyGizmo has for hiding and skipping questions are great!) and never ask for information you already know.

4. ACTION

The fourth principle for creating a good survey is ACTION. The only reason to do a survey is because you want to take some kind of action. That action usually means making a decision. It may be a decision to change the services you offer, build a park, not build a park or even start a company, but if you can’t touch on some action you don’t need to do a survey.

5. ENGAGEMENT

The fifth principle for creating a good survey is ENGAGEMENT. This principle sums up the other four. If you follow the first four principles the result will be an engaged respondent and that will mean better response rates and better information. You can further engage your respondents by offering to share a summary of your results with them and let them know what was done with the information they provided. That will keep them engaged and ready for your next survey!

Google + SurveyGizmo, Part 2: Integration

Two weeks ago we wrote a post describing how to pass information into SurveyGizmo from Google Adwords. Very nifty! *This week* we are going to pass information from SurveyGizmo into Google Analytics. Even niftier, huh?

Why would we want to do this? Well, Google Analytics is a very powerful (and free) web analytics suite. With it you can track survey conversions, path analysis, sources of surveys traffic and even various versions of your forms and surveys. It’s the best of both worlds.

So let’s get the ball rolling:

Introduction to Google Integration Code

When you create a Google Analytics account you are given code snippets and instructed to place them at the bottom of each page on your website. For use in surveys, you will need to add them to the HTML Template of your Survey’s Theme.

There are two parts of the code you are asked to embed: 1) A javascript library that Google provides and 2) a little snippet of javascript code that actually triggers the analytics record.

The first part looks like this:

<script src="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You should place this bit of code at the top of your survey’s HTML template (the very top).

The second part looks like:

<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "YOUR UA CODE";
urchinTracker();
</script>

So, where does this part go? Well, first we are going to modify this bit just a little. Why? Because we want to track individual survey pages, and make them a bit easier to understand in Google Analytics.

So, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pass an argument (a bit of data) to the urchinTracker function that will identify individual pages of the survey. We are also going to create a ‘fake’ folder for our survey. So change this second bit of code to:

<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "YOUR UA CODE";
urchinTracker('/surveys/surveyname/page[%%:Survey_Page%%].html');
</script>

You should replace ’surveyname’ for every survey you integrate. Make it distinct and understandable. The merge code [%%:Survey_Page%%] will merge in the current page number. Tip: If you want to get fancier you can merge in the value of a hidden question on the page, or even question data from previous pages this way.

Place this modified code at the very bottom of the HTML Template.

Congratulations. When you launch your survey, it will store the navigation and traffic information to your Google Analytics account!

From here you can treat your “surveys” folder like it was just another part of your website. You can run your favorite reports, build charts graphs, etc. Enjoy!

Next week we will look into test variations of your surveys and landing pages and doing analysis in Google Analytics.

Google + SurveyGizmo, Part 1: Adwords

In the past two months we have received a huge number of questions concerning Google and SurveyGizmo integration. We’ve gotten so many, in fact, that we decided to write a three-part article that shows everyone how to do just that.

This week: Part 1 - Tracking Keywords and Ad Type from Adwords
Next week: Part 2 - Using the A/B/C Splitter to Test Landing Page Variations
Finally: Part 3 - Hooking Your Survey up with Google Analytics & Conversion Funnels

This week we are going to show you how to link a landing page in SurveyGizmo to a Google Adword’s campaign and how to pass valuable information from Google into SurveyGizmo. The two pieces of information we are going to track are: 1) the keyword that triggered your Ad’s clickthrough and 2) whether your ad was shown on a search results page or on the content network.

Let’s leap right in:

Step 1 - Create your Offer Landing Page

Naturally, before we can go into Adwords and set up our campaign, we need to create a Landing Page for the offer. So, what exactly is a “landing page”?

Definition of a Landing Page

The destination web Page for people responding to an advertisement, designed specifically for that campaign and audience. The key difference between a home page and a landing page is that the former must be all things to all visitors, while the landing page should be narrowly designed to optimize conversion for a specific campaign.

The easiest way to create a landing page in SurveyGizmo is to create a new survey with our landing page template and then add your own text and images. Remember, with SurveyGizmo you can brand your landing page any way you want; our templates are just starting points.

Here are some tips for your landing page:

• Don’t ask for more information than you need. Each ‘extra’ field you ask for might cost you valuable leads.
• If you have a complicated qualification process, break it up into a few pages.
• Remember, you have all of SurveyGizmo’s features at your disposal. You can ask qualification questions or make your landing page interactive with Show/Hide logic!

Step 2 - Linking Google to your Landing Page

After you create your landing page, you need to setup your AdWord’s campaign to link to it. So, from your Adword’s control panel, copy the Survey Link that we provide you and paste it into the Adwords destination URL box.

Now here is the cool trick!

We want to track which keywords are generating conversions. To do that, we tag a little extra line after our survey url, like this:

http://survey.12342-21.sgizmo.com/?keyword={keyword}&from={ifsearch:search}{ifcontent:content}

This works becuase SurveyGizmo will automatically track data sent through the URL!

Now that we have keyword and ad type tied to every response, we can look at conversion as a whole, as in the report below. Just make sure to check off “Include URL Tokens in Summary report” for your report options:

Or, to get a more in-depth look, we can create a report that filters based on keyword and ad type.

If you are a Free user, you’ll have to export your data into Excel to see these keywords, but at the Pro level you get access to filtering so you can create reports right in SurveyGizmo.

That’s it for this week. If you have questions feel free to post them in the comments for this blog post. I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

Next week: We will show you how to perform A/B split tests on your landing page to see which version and offer text work best!