What is a Survey?

Surveys let you capture user feedback using a variety of question types and customization options. This article provides an overview of Surveys and we recommend exploring the links throughout this article to view more detailed instructions. If you'd like to create a survey right away, see our How to Create a Survey article.

• Key features of Surveys
• Types of Surveys
• Understanding Survey Questions
• Analyzing Survey Data
• Advanced usage and troubleshooting

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Key features of Surveys

Surveys give context to quantitative data and help you understand what users are thinking. The key features of the Survey tool are:

• Build your survey from a template to speed up the survey creation process.
• Choose which type of survey you want to have control over its appearance and behavior.
• Select between several question types to keep users engaged and get more targeted responses.
• Use Survey logic to control a respondent's journey through your survey by skipping or routing users based on their responses.
• You can customize the appearance of your survey to match your brand colors, include a company logo, and use a specific language.
• Target a survey only to appear when a user visits a specific URL, a JavaScript event is triggered, or based on attributes about the user.
• Receive responses from partially completed surveys for questions where the user has answered and clicked Next.
• Results and responses include metadata for the response, visual representations of the results for each question, survey performance including completion rate, and the ability to filter responses and results.
• Connect what a user said with their experience by watching a session recording that included their response.
• Use AI to help create a survey, analyze results through sentiment analysis, generate an automated summary of responses, or automatically detect and add tags to individual responses.

Supported languages for Surveys

The language selected for a survey only affects the non-customizable text, which includes rating labels, input placeholder text, and Send or Skip buttons. Any customizable text needs to be manually written in your desired language.

It is not possible to create a single survey that dynamically adjusts its language. Each survey can only be configured to display in one language at a time, and customizable text will not be translated automatically. However, it is possible to target users with different language surveys you've created using User Attributes and Events.

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Types of Surveys

You can select from several types of Surveys, depending on your appearance and functionality needs.

• Popover Surveys show on the bottom of the page inside a widget that can be expanded or minimized, letting you engage with users at key moments in their journey.
• Button Surveys appear as a customizable button that expands into a survey.
• Embedded Surveys are shown inline with your page content, providing you with context-specific responses.
• Bubble Surveys appear at the bottom of the page as a chat-like bubble.
• Full Screen Surveys appear in a modal window with a darkened background to focus user attention.
• Link Surveys are hosted on a separate domain to your site, without the need for a tracking code, and can be accessed with a unique URL you can share across multiple channels.

Visit our Types of Surveys article for more details on each Survey type.

Special Survey Types

Some special Survey types can be used to match your needs.

• Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys use a 0 to 10 rating scale, with an overall Net Promoter Score for the last 30 days.
• Link Surveys can be used when you don't want to install a tracking code on your site, which is required for on-site surveys (Popover, Button, Embedded, Full Screen). A link survey is shown on a dedicated page using a domain different from your site.
• A survey that includes collecting respondent's email addresses can be used to invite those respondents to a user interview directly from their responses. This will create a new Engage Interview project with the respondent's information pre-filled. See our

  How To Invite a Survey Respondent to a User Interview article for more details.

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Understanding Survey questions

When creating a survey, you can select different types of questions. Each type has a different purpose and can be customized to your needs.

• Reaction: Present a scale of 5 images (Buddies, Smileys, Emojis, or Stars) to collect quick user reactions. The scale labels are customizable, and an optional image can be added.
• Long text answer: Users can give extended written responses in a multi-line, scrollable text field. You can customize the questions and optionally include an image.
• Short text answer: Users can provide brief responses in a single-line field, with the option to add an image and customize the question.
• Email (with validation): Collects email addresses and ensures responses are in the correct email format. You can also customize the question and optionally add an image.
• Radio buttons: Users can select only one response from a list of possible options. This allows for customization of the question, optional comment fields, and response randomization.
• Checkboxes: Users can select one or more responses from a list of options. The question is customizable with response randomization and optional comment fields.
• 1 - 5 or 1 - 7 Rating scale: Give users a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 7. Rating scale labels are customizable, and the option to add an image is supported.
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS): Users rate from 0 to 10, with survey results providing an overall score for the last 30 days. Rating scale labels are customizable, and an image can be added.
• Statement: This shows text to users without requiring a response. It is useful for giving instructions, and you can customize the statement and description and optionally add an image.

For more details on question types see our Types of Survey Questions article. You can also explore how to route users to specific questions in our article on Using Survey Logic to Skip Survey Questions.

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Analyzing Survey data

Your survey responses can be analyzed using several features, such as directly investigating the responses and results, using AI for deeper insights, and creating an automated summary of a survey's results.

Responses and results

• Responses

  View the individual answers and related metadata (e.g. Date, URL, Browser, Device). You can filter responses, show or hide data columns, add tags, and download responses for further analysis.

• Results

  You can see a graphical representation of collected data, including sentiment analysis and tags breakdown for short and long text answers, to quickly understand user sentiment.

• Performance

  Examine the metrics for your survey including impressions, starts, completes, and completion rates. You can also see detailed breakdowns for user engagement and drop-off rates across each question.

• Filters

  Use filters to narrow down survey responses based on date, page URL, survey completion status, whether a recording was captured, keywords, and tags.

Find more details in our article on Understanding Your Survey Responses and Results.

Analyzing results with AI

• Sentiment analysis

  Use AI sentiment analysis to automatically categorize responses as positive, neutral, or negative. Sentiment analysis helps you understand the emotional tone of the response. It can also be edited or used as a filter for deeper analysis of your results.

• Automated tags

  Rely on AI-generated tags to help detect recurring themes in your survey responses. You can either define the tags yourself or choose from AI suggestions. Tags can be used to filter results and quickly find responses you're interested in.

Learn more in our How to Analyze Survey Responses with AI article.

Creating an automated survey summary

• Generating a summary

  With AI, create a high-level summary of your survey responses. The summary includes sections for key findings, quotes, and recommended next steps. This feature requires at least 20 responses with long or short text answers.

• Viewing and updating summaries

  Generated survey summaries can be saved and shared with your team. You can update summaries to include the latest responses to ensure they remain relevant. Note that previous versions of the summary will not be retained when updating.

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Advanced usage and troubleshooting

Additional features with Surveys include targeting based on URL, JavaScript Events, and User Attributes, which can also be used to filter responses.

URL targeting

Make your survey or on-site invitation appear only when users visit a specific URL. Pages can be targeted based on simple match, exact match, starts with, ends with, contains, and regular expressions. For more details, see our How to Trigger Surveys with URL Targeting article.

Event-based targeting

Trigger a survey to appear based on specific actions or changes on a page, such as a page scroll or a user viewing a particular page variant as part of an A/B test. This is useful when you need more dynamic or context-sensitive triggering and URL targeting is insufficient. Event-based targeting will override any URL targeting. Learn more in our article, How to Use Events for Survey Targeting.

User Attributes

With User Attributes, you can send us user-specific data, which lets you target surveys based on predefined conditions about a user on your site. You'll first need to configure the Identify API to send attributes, then set up the targeting on your survey creation page. Multiple attributes can be combined for more specific targeting. Responses can also be filtered by User Attributes to analyze your data further. See more in our How to Use User Attributes with Surveys article.

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