You don't have to be a data nerd to create totally awesome insights from your surveys
As a product of the awesome 80's, I fondly remember the 1984 hit movie "Revenge of the Nerds". The film chronicled the journey of several outcast nerds as they try to form a fraternity in college and fit in with the popular crowd. However, the nerds despite their super human intelligence and analysis capacity did not fit in with the "in" crowd . By flexing their brain power, by the end of the movie, the nerds finally overcame adversity. You too can get nerdy with your survey data and still be one of the cool kids in the room. So put on your Ray Bans and get ready to flex your gray matter, here are three data nerd tips from Zoomerang's power users.
Don't lose what you already know
If you deploy your survey by email there are probably a lot of things you already know about the people your are asking to take your survey. Mostly likely you already know their name, email and other contact data. You may also know their location, department, years as a customer or employee, and last product purchased . When you send your survey, pass the the information you already know back into your survey. You can do this with URL parameters. URL parameters are like hidden survey questions and answers you can use when you analyze results. If you are use a 3rd party email client you can create a simple spread sheet with contact data and personalized URLs and upload it to your email provider to provide personal urls in your email invite. This will allow you to feed the contact data you already know back into your survey results for further analysis. Many email clients like ExactTarget, VerticalResponse, Silverpop and ConstantContact allow you to do this. Please refer to your individual email provider for instructions.
Here is a example of a simple spreadsheet using the concatenate function to create a personal url. Once you create your own spreadsheet, you can import into your email client. Before you send the email, be sure to set up these parameters in Zoomerang as URL parameters. Each parameter will display in your results as a hidden question and the unique values you enter for each parameter will display as the responses to that hidden question. Here is the link to our knowledge base "Adding Custom Variables to the Survey Link".
When you review the survey data you can create filters or segments based on these URL parameters and also transform these URL parameters into questions answer sets using tag clouds.
You don't need a Ginsu knife to start slicing and dicing data
You are guaranteed to find valuable insights by segmenting your data using filters. You can use filters on question-answer combinations, deployents and response dates. Many customers use filters to split up survey takers into demographic groups by gender, location and age. You can also use psychographic based questions focused on users values and opinions.
Here are some sample psychographic questions you can use to segment your survey:
- When shopping for a new computer, how many websites do you visit?
- How many social media websites do you participate in?
You can also use filters to clump your data in larger groups. If you notice an uneven distribution in survey answers options, you can also use filters to group answers sets. Your original question may cluster respondents into six age categories. For example
- 21 and Under
- 22 to 34
- 35 to 44
- 45 to 54
- 55 to 64
- 65 and Over
But you may find that by combining the categories into "under 45" and "over 45" you discover differences in behavior. So get started slicing and dicing your data to see what hidden insights are waiting to be discovered.
Behold your secret weapon.. the cross tab
Now that you know how to pass existing data into your survey and filter survey responses, you are now ready for the next level of data nerdiness... cross tabs and comparisons. You can start comparing answer options with cross tabs. A cross tab report shows the relationship between two or more survey questions. Often trends begin to emerge as you view the data side-by-side. Once your cross tab your data start looking for visible differences in the data sets being compared. Here is an example of a cross tab. Notice the diffference in answer options between the different age groups. 68% of respondents under 30 plan to use social media in their business, while only 23% of of those over 60 plan to use social media.
Check out our knowledge base for instructions on "Creating a Cross Tab Report".
If you have mastered the crosstab, you can take it to the next level with comparison reports (available for premium users) Comparison reports allow you to use filters to compare your results. Filters give your greater control over segmentation and can include multiple questions and narrow your results to specific date ranges. By comparing subsets of survey takers, you may find some interesting differences in behavior, The comparison report example below groups multiple age groups answer sets into two distinct groups "under 45" and "over 45". Of those who plan to use cloud computing technologies, 28% of people under 45 said yes, while only 5% of those over 45 said yes.
So now you've got a few data nerd tricks up your sleeve. If you stop snorting when you laugh you might impress your collegues or boss with your intelligent insights.
What are some of your survey analysis tricks? Please join the conversation in the comment section below.