Doing a survey on my visitors

[Raymond]

I currently have a 3 page survey on my website that focuses on the satisfaction of my customers. It is not doing well. It can only convert 1 out of about about 25000 visitors to complete the survey.

The analysis done on the logs suggest that about 65% visitors who click on the survey would complete the survey. The rest just exit the website after they are on the first or second page of the survey.

Now, I want to set up a survey that doesn't annoy my visitors. I just want them to enter whatever they feel like and I don't even want them to answer many specific questions anymore so they won't be as easily annoyed. My plan is to increase the exposure of the survey link on many pages of my site and the survey itself only contains 2 radio box questions and a textarea.

I wonder if anyone has done any research on how to get their visitors to complete a survey. Please advise.

[percentages]

>I currently have a 3 page survey on my website

Doomed to fail. 3 pages is more than a 1040, it will never work!

>the survey itself only contains 2 radio box questions and a textarea.

Now you have a chance with that one. The trick is short and meaningful. The survey needs to show the visitor that you both care and to some extent already understand their needs.

Too short doesn't tend to work well, too long never works. The content is critical, but without knowing the subject matter we can't discuss that.

[mack]

I always feel the secret to a good survey is not to long, not to short, but you also have to gather as much info as possible.

If you where to arange a survey asking every question you wish to ask (get as much info as possible) you would almost certainly end up with a huge multi page questionaire.

This presents 2 problems one for you and one for your user. The user will get bored very quickly and as a result will end up giving any old answer to get through the questions. This will result in not very good data for you.

What I would recomend is to break up your survey into several small questionaires. 2 or three questions. Use a random link to take the user to any one of your short questionaires. That way you get all the questions answered, but each unique user does not have to go through a long process. this can work well for gathering data but would not be very good if you wanted to do a lot of analysis with the data, for example how many users who answered yes to question 1 also like brand x in question 21. It does however allow you to gain more aqurate information.

Mack.

[Rosalind]

A lot of surveys will offer an incentive for visitors to complete them: earn so many bonus points, a prize draw, whatever. Some visitors will expect it, and when they find out there's no reward they won't bother.

[grandpa]

I let my visitors know that the survey is anonymous, I think that helps a bit. It's also short, a combination of 10 questions or text areas. The questions are answered by radio buttons options.