SurveyMonkey: Best Online Survey & Questionnaire Tool

If you are thinking about conducting a web based survey, chances are that your first impulse will be to use Survey Monkey. The popularity of this tool has skyrocketed on account of some very successful marketing campaigns. It has also helped that the survey software is very simple to use.

SurveyMonkey is a feedback software & website survey tool that allows you to create free online surveys using just your web browser with an intuitive survey editor. Select from over a dozen types of questions (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more..). Powerful options allow you to require answers to any question, control the flow with custom skip logic, and even randomize answer choices to eliminate bias.

Creating A Survey

If you know what you want to ask and are a professional survey writer, you can easily write your own survey from scratch. For people who aren’t quite so certain, Survey Monkey has plenty of templates ready to use.

It’s easy to select a template and modify it slightly to suit your purposes. This can be very handy if you’re in a hurry.

Don’t forget to try out the different themes. Make your survey stand out from the crowd!

Promoting Your Survey

Survey Monkey make it easy to promote your survey when it’s complete. You can send an email with a link, get Survey Monkey to send email on your behalf, embed the survey in a website or promote on Facebook — all in a few short steps.

The different methods of accessing the surveys are known in Survey Monkey as “collectors”. You can control these collectors and determine how users will be limited in their responses (eg. how many times they can respond and whether they can change their answers). By adding multiple collectors you can also track which types of survey promotion are most effective for you — why go to the effort of embedding a survey if your customers all respond to your Facebook links?

Analysing Survey Results

The default free survey results display is certainly an adequate tool for the job of analysis. No results are hidden from you — the information is simply collected and displayed in a basic table.

Features

1. No limits - You can create surveys with an unlimited number of questions.
2. Skip / conditional logic - You can set the survey up to automatically skip questions that aren't applicable to the respondent based on their answers to other questions (ie: if the respondent doesn't own a car, the survey will skip the question about the color of their vehicle).
3. Randomize answer choices - The ordering of choices within a question can introduce an unintended bias. This service enables you to randomize answer choices to eliminate order bias.
4. Filter results - Helps you find patterns in your results.
5. Share results - You can let others view the results without giving them access to your Survey Monkey account. You can also control which results are visible (depending on what's relevant to the audience receiving them).
6. Download results - All of the data can be downloaded to your computer for further analysis. The results can be exported into Excel, which you can use to create graphs.
7. Guaranteed privacy - All of your questions and answers will remain private (not accessible to outsiders).
8. User-friendly surveys - The user experience is enhanced through interactivity.

Ease of Use

Survey Monkey is an easy-to-use online survey tool for the creation of online surveys. Its primary strength is its intuitive Web interface, which makes it easy for even non-technical folks to create surveys and export collected data. It has advanced features, like the ability to branch questions based on response and exporting to different formats, including HTML, CVS and SQL.

Improvements

Although Survey Monkey has some great features at a decent price, there are some areas that could use some work. Since I started using Survey Monkey two years ago, there have been few new features or updates. Some might say the application is fine as-is, but I think there are some areas that could be improved.

I would like to be able to customize the interface even more. It would be nice to be able to remove or change the appearance of buttons and checkboxes, and apply my own style sheet.

Even with a Professional account, you are limited to one user. This can be a bit of a pain if you have more than one person who needs to create surveys. You end up with everyone using one account—each with access to all surveys on that account—or forcing users to set up free accounts and move their surveys over to the central account. It would be nice if there was an “Enterprise Monkey” account for multiple users, customizable roles, a “shared” area for surveys that all users can edit as well as “private” areas accessible only by survey owners.

Conclusion

Overall, Survey Monkey is a great product for the price (especially the free account!). By distributing survey authoring, it can save Web managers and teams a lot of time.

It’s easy to use and very flexible—especially when creating questions and accessing survey results. Before jumping into a Professional subscription, I would suggest using the free account to get used to the interface and features. Once you are comfortable with how it works, upgrade to the Professional account for the additional features, if you need them.