Questions Per Page Best Practice

It takes a lot of careful editing to improve your survey response rate. Survey best practices indicate that to improve response rate you need to limit scrolling in order to reduce work on the respondent. You do this by fitting as many questions as you can onto one page, so that the user never has to scroll down in order to get to the next question.

Instead they click “next,” which is an easy to find button on the bottom right corner of the page. However, far too many researchers are taking this too far. Rather than simply fitting as many questions as they can onto a page, many researchers are placing only one or two questions on a page.

These researchers are forgetting that clicking “next” also takes work, so by limiting the number of questions on each page they’re also creating more work for the respondent. Ideally, you need to come up with a balance, by fitting as many questions as you can on a page without scrolling down. This can be difficult, so what follows are several strategies you can use to fit more questions on a page.

Play with Formatting First and foremost, you should play around with fonts and formatting. While a larger font is useful, because it ensures that those with vision issues will be able to answer it easily, most people these days have glasses, contacts, or Lasik, and can stand to use a smaller font – especially if you choose a font that is easy to read. Don’t put it too small, of course, but there are ample ways to format your survey that will help you fit more to a page.

Cut Out Some Branding Companies love to brand their surveys. Often they think of surveys as part research, part marketing tool.

But really, surveys are meant to be all about research. Shrink the size of your logo, use smaller text when you introduce your business, etc. All of these will cut down on the space they take up in your survey and ultimately make it easier to fit more questions on a page.

Remove Unnecessary Open-ended Questions Open-ended questions consume a great deal of space, and as we’ve discussed in the past, they may be largely unnecessary. Before asking an open-ended question, ask yourself if its answer is really necessary. Chances are the question box will be taking up more space than you need for an answer that isn’t that valuable in the long run.

Be Conservative with Survey Logic Survey logic is an outstanding way to make a survey better. It shortens the survey, it allows for easier analysis, and it targets relevant questions to those that have a relevant answer.

But for survey logic to work, a question needs to be answered first. You cannot show a respondent relevant questions without knowing what their previous answers are. If you use survey logic too liberally, that means you’re likely to find that you default to one or two questions per page, simply because you need the respondent to answer a question before they move forward.

Use survey logic less often, or group questions together better, and you’ll be able to fit more questions on each page. Utilize Question Tables Finally, always remember the value of question tables. Question tables allow you to fit numerous questions on a page because they all share a similar answer key.

They drastically cut down the number of pages in your survey while still asking your visitors several questions at a time.

Remember, when your goal is to get the best response rate possible, you need to do everything you can to reduce the amount of work the respondent has to complete in order to fill out your survey. That means not only keeping questions on one page without scrolling, but also fitting as many questions as possible on each page to reduce the number of times the user has to click the “next” button. These tips should help you improve the number of questions you can fit on each page and improve your completion rate by a hefty margin.