Easy Quiz and Survey Set Up

Add quizzes and surveys to your online marketing efforts.

Aliza Sherman

Digital Marketer

March 5, 2009

4 minute read

Episode #43

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Easy Quiz and Survey Set Up

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Hi there, The Digital Marketer here, ready to help you put the power of the Internet and technology to work for your business.

Would you like to add surveys or quizzes to your website, blog or online marketing campaign? Surveys and quizzes can attract users, encourage interactivity and also provide you with some basic profiles of your Web audience.

I love taking quizzes and filling out surveys online as long as they are relatively short. I also want to understand the purpose of these queries. Why is the company or organization asking me these questions?

Reasons For Quizzes or Surveys

There are many reasons to set up quizzes or surveys online, and you need to let your visitors know why you are asking. Some good reasons to ask questions include

learning more about your Web audience such as where they are located, their ages and their income levels;
learning more about the online habits of your audience such as how often they shop online and what they spend on average;
engaging your Web audience in creative ways to provide you with feedback about your site, your company, your products or services; and
communicating a message and gauging audience interest or support.

Even if a quiz or survey is meant to be entertaining, you can still gather interesting data and statistics about your site visitors, blog readers, customers and potential customers.

Quiz Versus Survey

When should you use a quiz versus a survey?

Usually quizzes are a format used to test something such as your customer’s financial savvy or how comfortable your customer is with buying big ticket items online. A survey can be a little more formal and used to gather data to gauge or measure something like a reader’s opinions or attitudes about a particular topic. Quizzes tend to give results to the user while survey results are oten sent privately to you, the creator of the survey.

Easy Quiz and Survey Solutions

There are many popular survey solutions on the Web that have a free level but charge fees for extra services and features. You might try SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang to build your surveys.Free versions usually only allow up to 100 responses. While 100 responses might sound like a sufficient number, if you’re thinking about publicizing the results of your survey, it should have at least 200 responses in order to be considered statistically significant. Chances are, however, your survey is more for internal purposes, and you can come up with useful information even with a smaller sampling.

If you pay for creating and hosting your survey, that fee usually buys you the ability to track responses from a much larger or unlimited audience, and you also get more options to customize your surveys features and appearances.

In terms of quizzes, you may want to check out Social Too — T-O-O — and try one of their social media-enabled quizzes. You can start a quick quiz or poll and easily send them to some of your social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Make sure that you go into your preferences on Social Too to remove any auto-responders that might be set up. Auto-responding on social networks is considered to be a faux pas, especially on Twitter. Also, you probably don’t want to automatically follow people who follow you although this is an additional feature on Social Too. My recommendation is to just stick with their quizzes.

Another useful free solution to online quizzes is available through Google Docs Forms. You can choose text boxes, multiple choice, checkboxes, scales, and other types of responses and quiz formats. After you share your Google Docs quiz, you receive all the raw response data in a private Google Docs spreadsheet where you can then tally the results.

Here are some quick and dirty tips for success with surveys and quizzes online:

Be strategic. Ask yourself “what is the business rationale behind this quiz or survey?” Make sure your questions solicit the information you need.
Explain up front why you’re asking the questions and what’s in it for the individual who is considering responding.
Commit to keeping the data you gather from others private, and explain your privacy policy on your site or blog next to the quiz or survey.
Keep your quizzes and surveys short. Ten questions is more than enough. Six questions is even better.
For longer surveys, try numbering them backwards. If you have twenty questions to ask, start with 20.

Bottom Line: There are many solutions available on the Web to add quizzes and surveys to your online communications and marketing campaigns. Sometimes asking questions of your audience is better than telling them something.

Contact Me

That’s all we have time for today. Visit the show’s website at digitalmarketer.quickanddirtytips.com for links to all of the sites mentioned in the show plus a few extras. If you’d like to ask a question or request a topic for The Digital Marketer, e-mail me at digitalmarketer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or leave a message by calling 206-339-6279.

The Digital Marketer’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Building Your Business With Web Tools is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips network at quickanddirtytips.com. Tune in for another business boost from The Digital Marketer, the host who’s not afraid to go under the Internet’s hood & get a little dirty!