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Advanced Branching

SurveyMonkey

Advanced Branching

Survey Requirements
Adding Advanced Branching
Using Multiple Rules
Conditions & Actions
Managing Existing Rules
Previewing & Testing Rules
Analyzing Your Results
Common Questions

Advanced branching lets you customize the behavior of your survey based on multiple conditions and it's one of our most powerful logic features.

Advanced branching rules are based on Conditions and Actions.

Conditions are things like a respondent's answers to a survey question, custom data from Contacts, custom variables, or survey language.

When the criteria defined in your conditions are met, the Actions will:

Skip respondents to a future point in your survey, either on the same-page, or to a future page.
Show or hide questions
Show or hide pages
Invalidate questions and customize error messages
Add unconditional skip logic to a page, so that everyone who reaches that page is skipped to a specific page later in the survey.

TIP! It's best to apply Advanced branching after your survey design is finalized.

Example for how you can use Advanced branching
Let’s say you’re surveying customers after a purchase from your site. You can have respondents select only the products they’ve purchased, from a list of options, and then show them follow-up questions relevant to only those products, while hiding the follow-up questions on products they didn’t purchase.
Another way to use the Advanced branching rule builder is to disqualify respondents who answer questions in a certain way. That way, you can seamlessly send respondents to a disqualification page if their responses aren’t relevant to your survey's goals.

Survey Requirements

Before adding Advanced branching rules, consider what data you can base conditions on, and what collector types you'll need to use for everything to work smoothly.

Data	Description	Compatible Collector Types
Questions	Any question type except Text, Image, Click map, Text A/B test, Question A/B test, and Image A/B test. For questions with multiple rows, you can specify the row you want to base your condition on.	All collector types
Contact data	The custom data about your respondents that's stored in Contacts. For example: Email, First Name, Last Name, Custom 1, etc.	Email invitation
Custom variables	The values of the custom variables in the survey URL.	Web link
Survey language	The language the respondent takes the survey in.	All collector types

Adding Advanced Branching

Image of how to apply multiple rules. Shows advanced branching logic tab that includes two rules and an option to add another. There is an option to choose a page to go to after rules.

To add Advanced branching to your survey:

In the Design Survey section, go to the page you want to add logic to.
Click Page Logic at the top of the page.
Choose Advanced branching logic.
Click + NEW RULE.
Define the Conditions and Actions for this rule. You can add more rules after you save this one.
Click Save Rule.
Click Apply.

TIP! If you’re adding more than one rule, check out Using multiple rules.

Same-page Logic

You can add Same-page logic to your survey from the Advanced branching rule builder.

Set up your conditions and actions to either the Show question or Hide question. Same-page logic seamlessly adapts in real-time, as a respondent answers prompts respondents with the appropriate follow-up questions, on the same-page, in real time, potentially limiting the number of page breaks and eliminating unnecessary respondent clicks.

Same-page logic keeps respondents engaged, and they’re more likely to provide more contextual responses for deeper insights.

Steps to add Same-page Logic to Your Survey
Within the Advanced branching logic rule builder, you set up same-page logic.
To set up same-page logic:
1. In the Design Survey section, Build your survey.
2. Once your survey is fully drafted, go to the top of your survey page that has the question you want to trigger logic on.
3. Click Page logic at the top of the page.
4. Choose Advanced branching logic.
5. Click + New rule.
6. Select criteria for your Condition and Actions to either Show or Hide future questions when your conditions are met.
  Confirm that your survey doesn’t include same-page logic limitations described in the expand below.
7. Click Save Rule.
8. (Optional): You can add more rules after saving your first.
9. Click Apply.
Same-page logic limitations
There are some incompatible features with same-page logic rules. Check that your survey doesn’t mix the following features with same-page logic:
- Your survey can include A/B Test (Random Assignment), Single textbox, Multiple textboxes, Comment box, File upload, Max diff, Date/Time, Address, Click map, Email address, Name, and Phone question types, but you can’t base your logic Condition on these question types. You can set an Action based on these question types, however.
- One question at a time mode isn’t compatible, use Classic mode if adding same-page logic.
- Question randomization can’t be combined with same-page logic. Both features can be used in your survey, but they can’t be applied to the same questions.
- Advanced piping and Question and answer piping can’t be applied to the question you base Conditions on.
- It isn’t possible to set a Same-page logic condition on contact data or custom variables.
Preview Your Same-page Logic

Using Multiple Rules

Types of Rules

The Advanced branching Logic tab is split into two sections where you can set up the three different types of rules.

Section	Rule Type	Description
Advanced branching rules	Advanced branching Rule	A rule composed of a condition and an action.
Advanced branching rules	Conditional Skip Rule	A rule composed of a condition and a branching action, specifically. Find a full list of actions in the Conditions and Actions section.
If no other skip rules apply, proceed to this page...	Unconditional Skip Rule	An unconditional rule composed of an action only.

Order of Rules and Conflicts
When a respondent submits a page in your survey, all the rules on that page are evaluated in order from top to bottom. If you use multiple types of rules together, the following hierarchy applies:

Advanced branching Rule > Conditional Skip Rule > Unconditional Skip Rule

If two or more rules of the same type conflict with one another, we take action on the first rule in the list, and ignore any subsequent rules that conflict with it.
Using Advanced Branching with Question Skip Logic
While you can use Question Skip Logic and Advanced branching on the same survey, we suggest using Advanced branching exclusively so you can manage all of your logic in one place and better avoid conflicts.
If you do use Advanced branching and Question Skip Logic together, and there's a conflict between the two types of logic, the following hierarchy applies:

Advanced branching Rule > Conditional Skip Rule > Question Skip Logic > Unconditional Skip Rule.

For example, if you have an Advanced branching Rule and Question Skip Logic based on the exact same condition, the Advanced branching Rule takes precedence.

Conditions and Actions

Creating rules is as easy as creating logical sentences based on questions in your survey, or information about your respondent. Every rule is made up of two parts: a condition and an action.

You can build rules based on the following subjects. Keep in mind that some subjects will only work when you use a certain collector type to send your survey.

Conditions

Conditions define the fields you want to base the rule on, and how you want us to evaluate those fields. Conditions are made up of three parts:

Part	Description	Example
Subject	The data you want to base the rule on.	Q4: What is your age?
Operator	Tells us how to evaluate the subject's value to make the condition true. You can use several different operators to define the relationship between the subject and the value.	is one of
Value	The value of the subject you're basing the rule on. This could be the answer choice the respondent selected, the open-ended response they type into your survey, or the data that we know about them already from Contacts, Custom Variables, or survey language.	17 or younger 18-20 21-29

Adding Multiple Conditions to a Rule
You can add multiple conditions to a rule and use the Boolean operators OR or AND to define the relationship between the conditions.

Within a single advanced branching rule, you can either use all AND operators, or all OR operators—you can't mix and match.

The NOT Boolean operator is not available.

Actions

Actions define what the survey should do if the conditions are met.

There are two types of actions: Branching Actions and Other Actions. Branching Actions let you skip respondents to a later point in the survey when the conditions of your rule are met. Other Actions let you show or hide questions and pages, or invalidate questions when certain conditions are met.

Rule Type	Action	Description
Branching Action	Skip to page	Skip the respondent to a future page in your survey.
Branching Action	Exit block	Skip the respondent to the next available block, if Block Randomization applied. If a block is not available, the respondent will skip to the next available page.
Branching Action	End survey	Skip the respondent to the Survey End Page option. The response is marked as COMPLETE when you view their individual response
Branching Action	Disqualify respondent	Skip the respondent to the disqualification page that you select in the collector options. The response is marked as DISQUALIFIED when you view their individual response.
Other Actions	Hide question	Hide a question on a future page in the survey. Questions are shown until the conditions are met.
Other Actions	Show question	Show a question on the same-page or a future page in the survey. Questions are hidden until the conditions are met.
Other Actions	Hide page	Hide a future page in the survey.
Other Actions	Show page	Show a future page in the survey. Pages are hidden until the conditions are met.
Other Actions	Hide Answer	Hide an answer option of a question on a future page in the survey.
Other Actions	Invalidate question	Invalidate any question on a future page, or the current page, and customize the error message that respondents will see when they try to proceed to the next page of the survey.

Managing Existing Rules

To view or edit an existing rule:

Click the advanced branching icon « at the top of a page to view or edit the rules applied to that page.
Click the down arrow to the right of any existing rule to edit, copy, delete, or move a rule.

You can't copy or move rules to another page in the survey. You need to re-build the rules on the new survey page.

TIP! When you save a rule, we convert it into a script. To understand what an existing rule means, you can hover over the script to see what each piece represents.

Previewing and Testing Rules

The best way to test Advanced branching depends on the subjects you based your rules on.

When previewing a survey, you can view your Advanced branching rules alongside your survey preview, so you can test your logic flows are set up properly.

Testing Rules Based on Questions
Testing Rules Based on Custom Data from Contacts
If any of your conditions are based on custom data from Contacts, the best way to test your survey is to create a group in your Contacts and then send an Email Invitation to that group.

When you create a test group, include email addresses that you have access to for testing. When you add custom data to those contacts, make sure that you have a test contact for each persona you based your advanced branching rules on. For example, if you use the Custom 1 field to record each contact's department, and you based advanced branching rules on multiple departments, make sure to create a test contact that represents each department.

When you compose your invitation message, insert custom data tags into the message so you can refer to the set of custom data you're about to test when you receive the email.

After you're done testing, clear and delete the collector to remove the test data from your survey.
Testing Rules Based on Custom Variables
Testing Rules Based on Survey Language

Analyzing Your Results

Your results in the Analyze Results section will look the same as any normal survey. If a respondent was skipped past a question or page due to a branching action, or if a question was hidden from a respondent, the questions they didn't see are marked as skipped in the Analyze Results section.

There's no way to view or export the logic path that a particular respondent took through your survey.

Common Questions

Will my rules update if I delete or add more questions and pages?
If you delete pages, questions, or answer choices in your survey, advanced branching rules update automatically so you don't need to go back to update them manually. For example, if one of your rules is based on Q1, and then you add a new question before it that becomes the new Q1, the rule will dynamically update to reference Q2 instead.

However, we recommend waiting to apply advanced branching rules until after your survey design is complete. It's easier to apply logic once the organization of your survey is finalized.
Are values case sensitive?
What's the difference between Advanced Branching and Question Skip Logic?

Scoring Your Survey

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SurveyMonkey

Advanced Branching

Survey Requirements

Adding Advanced Branching

Same-page Logic

Using Multiple Rules

Conditions and Actions

Managing Existing Rules

Previewing and Testing Rules

Analyzing Your Results

Common Questions

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