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Create better surveys and spot insights quickly with built-in AI.

Purpose-built solutions for all of your market research needs.

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Learn what makes customers happy and turn them into advocates.

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Find out what attendees want so that you can improve your next event.

Uncover insights to boost engagement and drive better results.

Get feedback from your attendees so you can run better meetings.

Use peer feedback to help improve employee performance.

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Learn how students rate the course material and its presentation.

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Access SurveyMonkey's collection of sample questions and survey templates to create the perfect survey.

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Deciding that you need feedback is easy but creating a survey seems hard. We’re here to tell you it's not and that we make it really easy, from our sample questions to our pre-written survey templates, and our automatic charts and graphs.

You want to collect information or feedback from a group. What’s the best way to do it? A survey, of course. A survey is the easiest, most efficient way to gain insights that will help you improve your business. But the most important thing to know about surveys is that questions have to be designed a certain way to yield the data you need.

An online survey is just what it sounds like: a method for asking focused questions from a defined group of people via the internet. You can use these opinions and insights to help drive your business decisions.

Offering your survey, quiz or questionnaire online has definite advantages and a few challenges. But don’t worry, we’re here to make the process simple. We’ll get to our 10 easy steps to create your online survey, but first, let’s take a look at a little helpful information about online surveys in general.

Customise the look and feel of your surveys, send them in a variety of ways. See what most survey creators are using.

You may have experience of taking surveys on paper, by telephone or online. But when you’re on the analysis end of surveys, it's clear that the advantage is within online surveys.

Surveys have evolved a lot since the days when they were always filled out by hand. Online surveys tend to get higher response rates because they can be completed on any device. Get more tips for improving your survey rate >

As technology has advanced, online surveys have become the more affordable alternative to using agencies and market research firms. No need to set aside a large budget for creating, distributing and collecting surveys: you can do it all from a single platform, accessible to your entire team or organisation

When you create an online survey, the data from your respondents is available immediately. With SurveyMonkey, you can easily analyse your results and turn them into actionable insights. With no need to collect a paper questionnaire, you get your responses in real time. The margin of error is greatly reduced because answers are entered directly into the online survey system. See how it works

Online surveys are easy to create. Even on our most basic plans, SurveyMonkey offers sample questions and templates for almost any use case, from event planning to customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Our survey themes and customisations will have you making perfectly formatted, beautiful surveys in no time. Results come in real time, and our platform will use machine learning and AI to automatically analyse the data for you. There aren’t even any hassles with our advanced filtering and crosstab reports. It’s convenient for your respondents, too. They can take your survey on any device.

Our platform makes it easy to format an online survey. You can create the layout you want with the questions you need. Our Question Bank even offers answer choices, right out of the box.  No programming knowledge necessary. The flexibility to create exactly what you want is a huge plus. 

Some survey-takers might feel uncomfortable being completely forthright when speaking to someone directly in person or on the telephone. It’s much easier to open up when responding in private. The online process also eliminates any tendency towards bias that may be present during in-person interviews. Learn more about eliminating bias in your surveys >

Online surveys do not require printing, posting, stamps or a person to conduct interviews. There’s no need to enter data manually into a database, as it’s collected automatically. This is a huge advantage and makes offering surveys more affordable than having the staff to conduct the surveys.

SurveyMonkey empowers you to create accessible surveys that are Section 508 and WCAG 2 compliant. We have an accessible survey checklist to help you ensure that your survey will work with a screen reader. We also offer out-of-the-box survey designs that ensure they’re accessible to people with visual disabilities.

Potential cheating

If your survey contains too many questions, questions that are confusing, or it is just too complicated, people may not answer truthfully. Respondents are answering the survey in private, so they may not be compelled to take the time to answer accurately. They could simply be clicking any circle to get the survey done. This is especially true if they are only taking the survey to receive a promised reward.

Limited sampling and respondent availability

Some populations have limited internet access or are less likely to respond to online surveys. This may affect not only the number of respondents but also the demographic of your results. If you need additional responses for your surveys, SurveyMonkey Audience can help. 

Possible cooperation issues

Online surveys can be deleted or ignored. Popular email clients sort mail for recipients, so surveys sent via email may not be seen in their primary inboxes or may be disregarded as “junk mail”.

Little oversight or moderation

While the lack of an interviewer is a strength in some ways, it’s a challenge in others. An interviewer can clarify confusing questions or ask for more details to explain answers. Without that factored in, respondents may make inaccurate assumptions that make their answers erroneous.

These four common types of online surveys (customer satisfaction, employee engagement, market research and customer feedback) provide businesses with key information to inform future goals and growth. Each one provides crucial data for business plans, HR departments, product development and customer relationships.

Find out how your customers feel about your products, services and business practices with a customer satisfaction survey. The information gleaned from this type of survey can be used to make changes and improvements that will keep your customers happy, loyal and engaged with your brand. 

Use customer satisfaction surveys to:

  • Determine the effectiveness of your customer service representatives
  • Find out about customer satisfaction with your brand
  • Identify products or services that resonate with your customers
  • Pinpoint areas for improvement
  • Measure customer loyalty
  • Improve customer experience

Get a handle on how your employees feel about many aspects of your brand, services, company and management with an employee engagement survey. Responses to these survey questions help you understand the impact of your current systems and shine a light on areas that are in need of improvement. Keep your employees engaged, happy and more productive with employee engagement surveys.

Use employee engagement surveys to:

  • Build a more inclusive workplace
  • Understand employee sentiment with salaries, benefits and perks
  • Evaluate job satisfaction
  • Examine manager effectiveness
  • Perform exit interviews

Learn more about SurveyMonkey Enterprise, which can help organisations create happier, more productive workplaces. 

Businesses from small startups to Fortune 500 companies use market research to inform their decisions. Market research surveys help you understand what your target market wants and expects, whether for a product, service or your overall brand. Don’t rely on your gut instinct to make those important business decisions; do your research.

Use market research surveys to:

  • Find out your target audience’s opinion of your brand, product or service
  • Assess what is missing from the market and opportunities for growth
  • Launch new products
  • Evaluate the success of an ad campaign
  • Measure brand awareness
  • Find out where you stand against competitors

Drive better decisions by capturing market needs, industry trends and buyer feedback. Explore SurveyMonkey Market Research Solutions

Your customers can help you improve your business through customer feedback surveys. Gather feedback throughout the customer journey to assess brand awareness, purchase experience, retention and loyalty.

Use customer feedback surveys to:

  • Better understand your customers’ behaviours, perceptions and attitudes
  • Measure brand awareness and sentiment
  • Identify pain points in your purchase flow
  • Optimise your customer service
  • Improve customer loyalty

So, now you’re ready to take advantage of all those benefits from an online survey. Here are a few things you need to do before you start actually creating the survey:

The first and most important step when thinking about how to make a survey is to identify why, exactly, you want to create a survey in the first place. In other words, what’s the objective?

A concise and focused objective can help you make a survey that asks just the questions you need to get answers you can apply. Here are some things to ask yourself as you brainstorm your survey’s objective:

  • Who else will be seeing and using the responses? 
  • What insights am I hoping to gain? 
  • What decisions am I ultimately looking to make?

Once you understand why you want to make a survey, you can move forward in building it. This page will show you how to create a survey that delivers invaluable insights through the following key tips. 

What is your objective? Exactly what do you want to learn from this survey? Make sure you have a clear goal in mind before you begin formulating questions so your data is relevant to what you want to learn. This will help you design the survey to address your objective.

Who is your target audience for this objective? Clearly define who you want to receive data from. Is it customers? Employees? Defined demographic groups? Determine which group of people is going to give you the insights you need. If you want to know about your brand awareness, then you’ll want to target the market, and perhaps a specific demographic that already knows your company. However, if you want to know how your product is performing, you’d reach out to the people already using it: customers.

Keep your survey questions to the minimum necessary to collect the data you need. Don’t overwhelm respondents with extraneous queries. Short, focused questions will lead to better quality and quantity of responses. We recommend limiting surveys to 10 questions at most. And if you need to go beyond that, consider offering respondents an incentive for providing their feedback, e.g. discount coupons.

It’s important to communicate clearly in your survey. This means literally creating a multilingual survey if necessary, as well as using language that reflects your target audience’s cultural norms. Stay away from corporate jargon like “vertical”, “thought leadership” and “growth hacking”. Present your survey with clear, concise, natural language.

Before you send the survey out, test it. Ask some of your team members or a few select members of your target audience to take the survey. This will help you identify any glitches or questions that aren’t clear so you can fix them before sending the survey to your full list. Learn more about collaborating on surveys as a team

Depending on the survey and the audience, offering an incentive may increase your response rate. Most people like being rewarded for their time. SurveyMonkey research has found that incentives can improve your response rates by an average of 50%. Try to keep the incentive in line with what you’re asking of the participants. If the incentive is too large, you may receive fraudulent results as people take the survey multiple times to obtain the incentive.

Response rates can be improved by sending out reminders to those who have yet to respond to your survey. Send a reminder 48-72 hours after your initial survey request. If you need to send further reminders, limit them to four. Make sure you’ve set a cutoff point for accepting surveys and don’t send any reminders beyond that point.

Find additional resources on creating online surveys from our blog, and visit our Help Centre any time to learn how we can help you create the best survey for your purpose.

There are a lot of choices to make when you’re writing a survey, but following some basic rules can help you make the right choices every time. Here are 10 great tips for creating a survey that provides you with the answers you need.

Group similar questions to keep your survey logical and focused. Page breaks, page titles and instructions help people understand what you’re asking and why.

Example of grouping similar questions together with page breaks

Using the same question in a series of surveys, or even using the same survey over time, is a good way to build a baseline and measure changes in respondents’ attitudes.

A list of similar questions to test the respondents' attitudes

Respondents really don’t like surveys that are too long. So, when you’re thinking about how to make a survey, just remember to minimise the number of questions you ask. Browse through hundreds of sample survey questions and survey templates to help you craft the perfect survey for your needs.

Work on your survey with your team with our collaboration features. A 2019 TechValidate study revealed that more than 80% of our customers create better surveys and get better results when they collaborate. Empower your team, improve efficiency and share data faster with collaboration.

Get your own social proof at scale. TechValidate captures and transforms customer feedback into case studies, statistics, testimonials and more. 

Create survey questions that explore one idea at a time to make sure your respondents can understand what you’re asking. Vague, general, multi-part questions can be confusing and tricky to answer.

Spell out everything that could be interpreted in more than one way. Want to know if someone is conservative in your political survey? Make sure you specify whether you’re talking about the way they dress, their politics, their preference in music or cuisine or their political party preference.

Example of a list of very specific questions

Create a survey that keeps respondents focused by only showing them questions that directly apply to them. A great way to do this is by using skip logic to eliminate irrelevant questions.

Skip logic details

This type of closed-ended questions doesn’t capture people who are on the fence or the nuances of opinion. Yes/no questions are best for gathering a generic stat for something, such as 75% of people said they loved pizza. But this doesn’t give a scale of how much they love pizza or even what type of pizza they love. These types of questions can be valuable, but you won’t get much data if your entire survey consists of them. Learn more about closed-ended vs. open-ended questions

Presented with a matrix, respondents will typically focus on filling in the grid rather than paying careful attention to each question, and that will impair the quality of your data. Make sure you check out our tips for writing matrix questions for guidance.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Our survey template library is a great place to find the perfect survey style and questions. 

So now you know how to make a survey that brings in the responses you need to make better decisions.

If you want to become a true survey expert, check out our steps on writing survey questions. And if you want to create a survey more easily? We’ve got a wealth of ready-to-use survey templates for you to choose from. From customer satisfaction to marketing to employee engagement templates, we have a variety of options to help you make a survey that shines. Finally, for even more tips and tricks on creating great surveys, check out the SurveyMonkey blog.

Take advantage of these great SurveyMonkey resources and you’ll create a survey in no time.

  • Easy question creation - With 15 question types, including rating scales, multiple choice and more, it’s easy to create online surveys from scratch. Alternatively, choose certified questions from Question Bank, our library of question templates.
  • Custom branding - Customise the look and feel of your surveys. Add your logo, company name, colours and images. Create your own survey URL and send respondents to a promotional landing page upon survey completion.
  • Advanced features - Get the data you need with required questions and response validation. Eliminate bias with random assignment (A/B testing) and randomisation. Create interactive surveys with skip logic and question piping.
  • Find survey respondents - Reach your ideal target market by buying high-quality, well-targeted responses via our fast DIY market research solution SurveyMonkey Audience.
  • Make your survey anonymous - We’re often asked: “Is SurveyMonkey anonymous?” The answer is yes, if you want it to be. More often than not, you’re in a better position to decide whether your audience wants the feedback to be kept private or not; while our focus is kept on equipping you with the technology and know-how so you can make and act on that decision. Follow these three steps if you want your audience’s responses to be kept confidential.

Now that you know how to create an online survey, go ahead and get started with SurveyMonkey.

Search our gallery of 150+ expert-written surveys for any project: customer satisfaction, employee engagement, market research, education and more.

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