Support Forums : Preventing Abandoned Surveys

Tare,

Would you mind posting a link to your survey so I can take a look. You can email it to support [at] sgizmo.com if you’d prefer and I can pick it up from there.

Also, is your survey embeded on a webpage, or is it a stand alone survey?

There are many ways you can increase the likelyhood of someone taking your survey — once I see it I’ll be able to give you my best advice.

-Christian

Hi there!

My first suggestion is to place the Survey Link (image) in a more prominent location. Preferably above the fold (in the first screen grab of your website).

You might want to make your image a little clearer or just use plain text for the invite.

I think most of your abandons are currently caused by web crawlers (like google or yahoo) that are indexing your blog. You can add an attribute to your html inside the anchor tag it’s called rel=”no-follow” — that tells google not to follow that particular link.

You might also want to include a header graphic at the top of your survey, something to catch the eye and lead them into the survey. It should be as relevant to workplace violence. I usually look for these images on iStockPhoto (great site).

I’d also put a line at the top of your survey telling them how long the survey should take. Something like “This is a one page survey that should take no longer than 3 minutes.” You can also add some line breaks to your intoductory text to make it less of a “block” (people hate reading online for some reason).

You might also wan to publicize your survey a bit. Do you have any fellow bloggers that might be willing to post an invite to your survey on their blogs? Maybe a Google Group? Community website? Etc.

If you want to track what responses come from which source you can just tag the survey URL when you give it to their webmaster, like this:

http://s-xiwk0-8884.sgizmo.com/?source=google

SurveyGizmo will handle the tracking any URL variable that you pass to it (great for tacking Adword campaigns, btw).

Actually, that’s another idea (if your budget allows) you can post an Adword listing asking people to take the survey.

Those are some ideas off the top of my head. If anyone else on the forums has some suggestions I encourage you to post them!

-Christian

I’d like to add a solution option for preventing abandoned surveys: make the survey the landing page of the website and completing the survey grants entry into the website.

I haven’t tried this option yet, but I’d like to know what everyone thinks about the idea. Will it increase my rate of responses on my 3 question survey?

Hi Velmas

That could work. Testing it and giving it a try would be the best evidence.

We do have a lot of people using our tool to power landing pages that create some sort of a barrier page to their offer.

Good luck

Scott