Figuring out what website visitors really want can be tough. After all, it’s not like you can just grab their attention and ask them for their thoughts, right? Well, actually, you can.
Surveys are a tool you can use to stop beating around the bush and just ask for the information you need. While there are many strategies you can use to mine for information, surveys are one of the most flexible tools available and possibly the best way to gather the detailed thoughts and opinions of website users.
In this post, we’ll figure out if a survey is the right tool for your information gathering needs. Then, we’ll present the best survey tools for WordPress so you can start gathering data without delay.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
- When Is a Survey the Right Tool for the Job?
- How to Get the Most out of a Survey
- Five of the Best Survey Tools for WordPress
When Is a Survey the Right Tool for the Job?
Before you start installing plugins and writing questions you need to make sure that a survey is a right tool for the job. After all, there are plenty of other ways to learn about your website traffic — A/B testing, simple polls, and website traffic analytics are a few potential alternatives.
So you’ll want to make sure you understand the sorts of information that surveys are good and bad at gathering before deciding that a survey is your best option.
Let’s start with the positives. What sorts of information is a survey good at gathering?
- In-depth opinions and preferences.
- Extensive demographic information such as location, age, gender, and so forth.
- Detailed information about existing visitors, users, and customers.
That’s a pretty broad set of guidelines. Let’s narrow the field a bit by looking at some of the types of information that surveys are not good at gathering.
- Instinctive reactions — the preferences that your visitors aren’t even aware they possess. A/B testing is the right tool to gather this sort of information.
- Information about prospective visitors, users, and customers — you may attract a few responses from folks unfamiliar with your site, but expect those responses to be costly and hard to gather.
- Analytics information about your visitors, such as browser and device statistics, search terms, pages visited, and so forth. While you can ask for this type of information, an analytics program such as Google Analytics is a much better source.
- Basic information easily gathered with one or two simple questions — use a simple poll for these sorts of data gathering needs.
How to Get the Most out of a Survey
If you’ve decided that a survey is a right way to gather the information you’re after it’s important to carefully craft your survey if you hope to get the most out of your data collection efforts. Creating a great survey is a science. You have to think about proper question structure, order your questions appropriately, deal with human psychology to encourage survey completion, and consider how to interpret the data gathered.
While we can’t cover this topic extensively in this post, we will hit the highlights to help you on your way.
Tip #1: Have a Specific Goal in Mind
Don’t create a survey just for kicks. Have a specific data collection goal and build your survey with that goal in mind.
Tip #2: Have a Strategy for Gathering Responses
Completing a survey requires a certain amount of buy-in from survey takers. How will you secure that buy in? While some users will fill out your survey just because they like expressing their opinions, your response rate will be considerably higher if you throw some leverage into the equation.
In general, there are two basics types of leverage you can throw into the mix to solicit a higher response rate:
- A tangible reward, or
- An intangible benefit.
A tangible reward is the sort of thing you offer to get someone to sign up for your email newsletter — a free ebook or a free email course, that sort of thing. An intangible benefit is less obvious and will be specific to your unique situation. If your site engenders a strong sense of community, then the intangible benefit could be the opportunity to speak about the future of the community, to play a role in ensuring that the community continues to serve needs as effectively as possible.
Tip #3: Learn How to Write and Administer a Proper Survey
You absolutely must take the time to learn how to properly write survey questions, administer a survey, and interpret results. Research is a sensitive process and if you get it wrong you can wreck the validity of the results.
Thankfully, there are free resources that you can use to educate yourself. We recommend taking the time to work your way through Survey 101 from SurveyMonkey to learn the basics of creating and administering a survey that produces useful and actionable data.
Five of the Best Survey Tools for WordPress
Now that the groundwork has been laid we’re ready to check out some tools. We’ve narrowed the list of options down to the five best tools for creating surveys and embedding them in a WordPress website. Let’s get right to it.
Forminator
For a free, highly customizable, and easy-to-use polling option, look no further than our very own 5-star rated Forminator. Forminator can have a new poll up and running in just a few clicks. Plus, as we mentioned, it’s entirely cost-free to use!
How to Add a Forminator Survey to a WordPress Website
Once you have Forminator downloaded from the WordPress repository, uploaded, and activated on your site, a new survey starts in the Forminator admin. You can create a new poll directly from the Dashboard, or the Polls area, and then simply click Create to get started.
You will give the poll a name…
…and hit Create.
From this point, you can Edit the poll. In the Details area, you’ll enter a question and answers. Additionally, you can include a featured image and button text.
Next, you can edit the Appearance. Include custom colors, edit the form container, and design style. You can even add CSS from here.
There are more options for the poll; including Behavior (e.g. showing vote count, results display, etc), Email Notification settings, Integrations, and additional settings.
Once you have your poll set up accordingly, you can hit Preview to get a look at it!
Forminator delivers a shortcode that you can use on any WordPress page or post.
The poll can be edited at any time. Plus, Forminator keeps track of the results in its dashboard — and more! Be sure to read our guide to Getting the Most Out of Forminator for more information.
Google Forms
Google Forms is a free form creation tool integrated into Google Drive. In other words, if you already have a Google account (and who doesn’t?) then you already have access to Google Forms.
Since Google Forms is a Google Drive app, the only limits are the Google Drive storage limits. In other words, Google Forms is effectively unlimited.
How to Add a Google Forms Survey to a WordPress Website
To create a survey head to Google Drive and select the New button. From the drop-down menu, hover over More and then select Google Forms.
This will launch the Google Forms application. It’s a very intuitive application that you’ll get the hang of quickly.
Create your survey. When you’re ready to publish it click on Send to launch the Send form modal window. Select the symbol that looks like this “<>” and click Copy.
Log into WordPress and create a new post or page. Switch the post editor from Visual to Text and paste in the Google Forms code. Then press Publish.
Your Google Forms survey is now embedded in your WordPress website.
Typeform
Typeform is a survey platform that provides a drag-and-drop survey builder and tons of prebuilt templates so that you can create professional quality surveys that will impress your users. Typeform isn’t as easy to use as Google Forms. However, it does make it reasonably easy to create visually stunning surveys rather quickly.
Typeform does offer a free plan but it’s only good for 100 survey responses per month. So if you think you’ll get more than 100 people to take your survey each month you’ll need to upgrade.
How to Add a Typeform Survey to a WordPress Website
Typeform does offer a WordPress plugin which makes embedding a survey easy. So the first thing to do is to install and activate that plugin.
Next, go to Typeform, create an account, and create a survey. Once you’re satisfied with the results, select the Share tab and copy the survey URL.
To add your survey to WordPress you’ll need to create a post or page. Look for the Add typeform button above the post editor — you’ll only see it if you’ve installed and activated the Typeform plugin. Just paste the URL in the appropriate field and click Ok.
Once you publish your post or page you’ll see the Typeform survey embedded on your site.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey offers an intuitive survey builder, a variety of free themes and templates, and a free plan that’s good for surveys up to 10 questions long and up to 100 survey responses per month. If you need to ask more questions or gather more responses premium plans are available.
SurveyMonkey is very comparable to Typeform. It isn’t as easy to use as Google Forms, but the results are higher quality and you get access to lots of great looking prebuilt surveys you can use to jump-start the process of creating your survey.
How to Add a SurveyMonkey Survey to a WordPress Website
First, you’ll need to create your survey at SurveyMonkey. Once your survey is ready to go, switch over to the Collect Responses tab and select the Embed on Website option.
You’ll be able to choose between embedding the survey directly in your website, adding a popup that will direct visitors to the survey, or displaying the survey in a popup. Select the option you prefer. I opted for Embedded Survey.
On the following screen, you be able to fine tune the presentation of your survey and a variety of other options. Adjust the available options to your liking and follow the Next buttons until the installation code is displayed. Copy the code and head back to WordPress.
Create a new post or page in the WordPress admin area, switch over to the Text post editor, and paste in the SurveyMonkey installation code.
When you’re ready, click Publish and go check out your SurveyMonkey survey which is now embedded in your WordPress website.
Quiz and Survey Master
If you’ve been hoping for a plugin-based option that will allow you to forgo using an external survey service, then your wait has come to an end.
Quiz and Survey Master is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to create complex surveys and quizzes right from the WordPress admin area. Quiz and Survey Master is unlimited — create an unlimited number of questions and accept an unlimited number of responses.
Quiz and Survey Master is less polished than the other options we’ve covered. However, what it lacks in polish it makes up for in features. If you want granular control over surveys and the ability to create impressive quizzes that are scored automatically, Quiz and Survey Master is your best bet.
How to Add a Quiz and Survey Master Survey to a WordPress Website
First, install and activate the plugin. When you do, a new Quizzes/Surveys option will be added to the sidebar menu in the WordPress admin area.
Select that option and then click Add New. Name your survey and it will be added to the list of surveys. Now, hover your mouse over the name of the survey and select Edit.
Now it’s up to you to craft your survey. The interface is a bit intimating and does take a few minutes to get used to. Thankfully, if you get stuck (or if you’re the sort that prefers to study before you dive in) the Quiz and Survey Master website offers extensive documentation and free video tutorials to help you get up and running.
Once your survey is ready to go head back to the Quizzes/Surveys menu item and copy the shortcode.
Create a new post or page, paste the shortcode into the post editor, and click Publish. The survey will be published as the content of your post or page and will render seamlessly by inheriting the styling of your website.
Wrapping Up
Surveys aren’t the right tool for every information gathering need. However, they are a useful way to gather a lot of detailed information quickly and a particularly powerful way to get at user opinions and preferences.
There are lots of tools you can use to embed a survey in your WordPress website. Sometimes, the best survey tools may also be found as standalone services. In this post, we’ve covered the five options for WordPress we like best and showed how you can use each one to embed a survey on your website.
Let’s recap what we discussed:
- Forminator: Free, easy to use, unlimited polls, and highly customizable.
- Google Forms: Easy to use, unlimited, simple, and powerful.
- Typeform: Create visually stunning surveys with a drag-and-drop editor and gather up to 100 responses per month for free.
- SurveyMonkey: Use the available themes and templates to put your survey together quickly and gather up to 100 responses per month for free.
- Quiz and Survey Master: Create advanced surveys and quizzes from the comfortable confines of the WordPress admin area, gather an unlimited number of responses, and fall back on the developer’s documentation and free video tutorials if you get stuck.
All that’s left to do is to pick the right survey platform, craft an effective survey, develop a strategy for soliciting responses, and put your hard-earned data to good use.