Dynamical Google Forms: targeting the lazy audience (1 of 2)
Taking your surveys to the next level by not missing what the laziest (and arguably the busiest) part of your audience thinks!
Hey there, in this post a solution will be proposed for a common problem in the market research community: the tired audience.
When making a survey, it’s a great choice to use Google Forms. Not only because of it’s credibility but also because of it’s ease. You are off to a great start!
But then you think of all of this questions… they are more than ten! maybe twenty. How on earth can you expect people to complete such a long form?!
“It’s better to know the opinion of hundreds of people over similar topics, than knowing the opinion of a few over the exact same issue”
The proposed solution is to only include a fraction of the questions, tho eventually obtaining answers for all of them by making the selected ones vary in time. Let’s get a grasp of it with an example.
Imagine you want to find our the opinion of people in a neighbourhood about a new shop. The shop’s product is ice cream and for the sake of simplicity the audience are two persons.
WRONG SURVEY:
Q1: do you like ice cream?
Q2: how often do you buy?
Q3: how much do you buy?
Q4: what flavour do you like?
Imagine now that “person 1” answers them all, while “person 2” gets discouraged by the extension of the survey and doesn’t answer it.
Wouldn’t it had been better if “person 2” had answered a fraction, say Q1, Q2 & Q3, even at the cost of getting one answer less from “person 1”? Yes. But you can’t just remove a question to shorten the survey, because they are all important!
This is exactly what can be fixed by Dynamical Surveys: time-varying questions allow us to optimally squeeze busy audiences. For the sake of clarity it will be shown with the same example:
CORRECT SURVEY:
GoogleForm at 11:01
Q1: do you like ice cream?
Q2: how often do you buy?
Q3: how much do you buy?
GoogleForm at 11:02
Q1: do you like ice cream?
Q2: what flavour do you like?
Q3: how much do you buy?
(noticed how Q2 changed?)
questions will be varying in time
To make a Dynamic Survey you will have to run a code in a Google’s scripting platform called “Apps Script”. I will provide the code and explain it, but that will be done in the next article. First you should focus on being able to access the so-called “scripting platform”.
The whole process is well documented and it starts here. It may appear to be cumbersome, but once you start following the steps, which include “creating an authentication Token”, I promise it will become easy: it is self-explanatory.
CONCLUSIONS
Making surveys with Google Forms is a great choice. Credibility is important and Google is a trusted company.
When dealing with multiple questions, audience can be drawn in by reducing the apparent workload.
In order to randomly shift our questions and make our surveys seem smaller and more attractive, a GoogleScript Account must be set up in order to run the code that will be provided in the next article.
Last words:
“Our audiences’ time is precious, and they know it…“
And so is yours, so THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!
