Benefits of Surveys

User research and customer feedback collection are key inputs for any successful product or service. To better fulfill your customers’ needs, you must listen to your target market and get first-hand insights about its needs, requirements, and pain points. Understanding this is crucial to launching a product that has a strong value proposition and delivers on the essential needs and expectations of your target market, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.

Surveys provide first-hand, immediate feedback from both high engagement users, who may give you specific opinions about your product, and low engagement users, who can give you critical insights. With the Countly Surveys feature, you can customize your surveys and target specific segments of your app or website users based on various conditions, such as app version, performed event, or other custom user properties.

The main benefits of using the Surveys feature are:

• Receive feedback from a segmented user base
• Get a high response rate
• Collect and test user response to specific or new features
• Analyze your users’ product experience
• Identify pain points in the user experience
• Enhance user retention and lower churn rates
• Powerful market research
• Give your users a voice and analyze verbatims

Getting Started

The Surveys feature is enabled by default in Countly Enterprise and you can find it in the Main Menu > Feedback. If you still don’t see it, go to the Sidebar > Management > Feature Management and enable the Surveys toggle.

Survey Overview

Survey Types

There are 2 types of Surveys based on user/customer targeting:

1. Attributional - This is used to collect responses from users based on user properties like city, app version, device, etc.
2. Behavioral - This is used to collect responses from users based on performed or not performed events (e.g. clicked on “add to cart”).

Types of Questions

In Countly, there are 5 types of questions:

1. Open-ended questions - These questions require respondents to type in their answers. Such responses help companies to better understand individual users/customers. However, it’s quite difficult to analyze collected data with open-ended questions because responses are not standardized and are hard to categorize.
2. Drop-down lists - Drop-down lists are an easy way of showing a long list of potential answers. They allow respondents to choose a single answer quickly.
3. Rating scales - These questions provide a scale of your choice – from 0 to 10, for example. A respondent selects the number that best represents their answer.
4. Multiple choice - These questions allow respondents to select more than one answer from a list of options. This also allows you to set additional options, including choosing 'All of the Above,' 'None of the Above,' or 'Other' as responses.
5. Radio button - These buttons allow respondents to choose only one answer from the listed options. Choosing a second option automatically deselects the first one. However, you can also include an 'Other' option for extended input.

Using Surveys

Upon accessing this View, you will see a list of surveys and a general report showing the results for the surveys, as well as:

1. Selector for the metrics panel. Choose between metrics reflecting All surveys (regardless of whether they are currently active or inactive), or only the Active or Stopped surveys.
2. Total Surveys - Total number of surveys, both active and inactive.
3. Total Responses - Total number of responses given by each individual user who responded to each survey. If a user responds to more than one survey (i.e. gives responses 2 times for 2 active surveys) this is counted as 2 instances on Total Responses.
4. Response Rate - Percentage of the Number of Responses over the Total Number of Surveys sent out.
5. Survey list - Each survey can be quickly activated or deactivated using its respective toggle button. Clicking a survey name will take you to that survey's detailed view. You can also see the internal name of the survey, a mandatory field which is not visible to the end-user. You can also see the users who are part of the survey, their responses, response rates, and the tags related to the survey.
6. Table controls - Use them to change the columns shown in the table or to search for particular surveys.
7. Survey menu - Because surveys can be used periodically, you can quickly duplicate an existing survey or delete old ones.
8. + New Survey button - Opens the drawer to create a new survey.

Creating a Survey

Upon clicking the + New Survey button in the main Surveys View, a creation drawer will appear.

Creating a Surveys widget on Countly has 3 simple and easy steps:

1. Determine the survey settings and questions
2. Customize the survey appearance
3. Choose which users and/or devices will be targeted

Survey Settings & Questions

This first step contains the inputs necessary for creating the survey and includes:

1. Internal Name - Name for internal purposes; it will not be displayed to the end-user.
2. Survey Name - Name for external purposes; it will be displayed to the end-user.
3. Questions: You can add up to 5 questions for each survey. Also, remember that there are 5 types of questions in Countly Surveys.
4. Add user consent - Now you can enable User Consent for collecting any data related to a user. To know more, click here.
5. Thank-you message - Will be displayed to the end-user upon a successful survey submission.

Once you complete the "Internal Name", "Survey Name” field and add at least one question, you will be able to move on to the next step. If you leave the "Internal Name" and "Survey Name" field empty, the Next Step button will not be active.

On the left side of the screen, you will see a widget preview with its questions and thank-you message. All questions can be customized by question types and by editing the possible choices. You can also mark the questions as “Required” and randomize the order of choices using the provided checkboxes.

❗ Tip: Make your survey name identifiable, short, and simple. Avoid using special characters or long names for the best appearance of the survey widget.

Survey Appearance

Countly allows you to choose how and when exactly you would like a survey widget to be shown to your targeted audience, and whether or not the same user should see the survey more than once. There are two types of settings for these options depending on what user behavior triggers the appearance of the survey widget and what widget persistence is set:

Widget visibility:

• Until they submit the survey - This is the default option. The survey widget will be shown until the user responds on every new session based on targeting parameters.
• Until they close the widget - The survey widget will be shown until the user closes the widget based on targeting parameters. If the user closes it, the same survey widget will not be shown again and it counts for the Total Shown metric but will not be considered in the Responses calculation (see Using Surveys above).
• Always visible - The survey will remain visible to the end user at all times.

Behavior that triggers the widget:

• After the page loads - The survey widget will be shown once your website or app is fully loaded.
• After a delay of 10 seconds - For web applications, the user needs to remain on the same URL for 10 seconds for the widget to be triggered. For mobile apps, the user needs to remain on the defined page for 10 seconds. In both cases, the survey widget will be shown to the user after 10 seconds.
• When the user abandons the page - Available only for desktop devices, the survey is triggered when the mouse moves towards the top part of the browser.
• When the user scrolls halfway down the page - Once the user reaches 50% down your page, the widget will be triggered.

In this step, you can customize the main widget color and style, which affect both the main widget colors and the submit button appearance. You can also add a logo. Your choices will be reflected and shown on preview on the left side.

Survey Targeting

Surveys provides you with enhanced options for both page-based, behavioral (i.e., based on user cohort) and event/action-based targeting. It is mainly a 2-part segmentation mechanism: user property segmentation and user behavior segmentation. The slight but important difference between them is that user property segmentation is not dependent on an event.

User property segmentation - It helps you narrow your target group of users down using user properties. For instance, you may want to only show iOS users AND individual customers defined by a custom user property named accountType. To do that, you can use the query builder in the "USER PROPERTY SEGMENTATION" panel as shown in the image below. You can always extend your query to make your target set even more specific. If you don't want to specify any user properties, you can skip this stage.

User behavior segmentation - They can be added once you are done with User Properties. First, you must select the users who have performed/not performed a certain event or session. Then, set the frequency and time range. When you complete entering these criteria, add property will become enabled.

You can add filters such as country of a user, last entry time, input method, etc., and you can group similar users. The more filters you use, the more granular and deeper your data will be.

You can keep adding conditions by using the + Add Condition button. You can also associate custom tags to it. However, please note that this will be shown as an empty dropdown where you can add your tags. It won't have a predefined list to choose from.

By default, survey widgets are enabled. If you want to disable them, just uncheck Set widget to active checkbox. You may also change the survey widget status, appearance, and settings after you create it.

Now your survey is ready to go public.

Surveys Use Case

You can get to know your users’ first shopping experience on your e-commerce app by routinely running a survey to gather contextual feedback from users with a few questions. You can do that by following the next steps on Countly:

1. Create a new Survey.
2. Define your questions, such as “How do you rate your shopping experience on our app?” or “What did you like most on our app?”
3. Customize the survey appearance.
4. Define your target audience using the following conditions for User Behavior Segmentations:

• users who performed clickPayment event is 1 time during all time
• which Last Payment is set

Customization

After settings and questions, when you click on the next step, the following screen will appear:

1. Visibility - determines how long the survey will be shown to the user.
2. Trigger - specifies when the survey will be displayed. 
3. Position on Page - This allows you to place your survey on a specific position of a page.
4. Widget main color - You can choose your survey widget color from this color grid.
5. Logo - You can customize your survey by adding your company logo. Please use PNG or JPEG file types for the logo.
6. Buttons - You can customize your button name here.

Targeting

You can also create a Cohort for your target audience on Countly Cohort plugin and just set a rule by using this Cohort.

Individual Survey Detailed View

Further details about each particular survey can be accessed by clicking on the survey name.

Upon accessing the details of an individual survey you will see:

1. General information, such as status and details.
2. Box detailing the targeting selected for the surveys.
3. Results summary box covering similar details found in the general Surveys View:
   Times Shown expresses how many times your survey was shown to the target audience. Some users may not be willing to respond to your survey, so it is important to know this metric. For example, if you set your survey widget appearance for until they submit a response, the Times Shown number will be probably high. Responses shows the total number of responses you have received for that particular survey.
   Response Rate is calculated by Times Shown divided by total Responses.
   You can filter the results by Platform or App Version on the top-left corner and select a particular time frame with the calendar menu on the top-right corner. These filters will affect both the Summary results and the table with Results/Questions underneath.
4. Results tabs: Questions (selected by default) and Responses, both displayed on the table underneath.
5. Survey controls, that allow you to stop, edit, duplicate, or delete the survey.

Questions Tab

This tab shows the results of each individual question.

Note that each question type will display responses differently.

For open-ended questions (text-based answers), you see the last 10 answers. If you want to see all the answers, click on the “View All Responses” link below these questions. You can also export the results as a .csv, .xlsx, or .json file.

Responses Tab

This tab shows the responses of each individual survey, displaying the responses by each user. You can filter responses by questions.

Also, you can learn more about the respondent by clicking on the View User button. This will lead you to their user profile.

FAQ and Troubleshooting

Can I run Surveys based on behavior of users, like a performed event?

Yes. Countly provides you the ability to target users based on performed events such as a clicked button, the submission of a form, or a successful money transaction. Also, you can target users based on user properties like country, membership type, language, etc.

Why can’t I visualize a survey?

When Surveys are triggered by user properties, these should be determined by Cohorts. And because each cohort has a determined regeneration time, a cohort needs to be regenerated for the user to see the widget.

The logic behind the visualization settings of Surveys widgets depends on the type of SDK, mobile or web.

In general, when determining these settings, note that survey persistence options (“Customers are going to see the Survey widget” in the image above) are valid for both mobile and web SDKs.

In web SDKs, the survey behavior option (“Users will see this survey”) needs to be chosen as well, because the web SDK fetches the response data from the server, as shown here: the web reporting logic needs an API to fetch the survey from the server as well as to display them to the end-user. You can find more information here.

In mobile app SDKs, feedback widgets are not automatically shown, so app developers need to display them manually.

Is there any limitation to the length of a Survey name? And how many choices can be added for a particular Survey?

No, you can add a Survey name of any length. You can add up to 10 choices for a particular survey.