SurveyMonkey

Previewing, Testing, and Reviewing Surveys

Before sending a survey, preview it to make sure everything looks and works as expected.

Previewing lets you see how your survey will look to respondents. You can make sure logic works the way you want it to, and invite people to review and comment on your survey before you send it.

There are limits to editing a live survey, so it's helpful to edit your survey design before collecting responses.

If you want to test your collector options, you can create a test collector.

Once you’re done designing your survey, click Preview survey to open a preview of your survey in a new tab. From that page, you can:

  • Take your survey as a respondent would in the middle section of the screen without saving the response
  • Review the Survey overview and logic paths, and add comments
  • Invite others to comment via Share for review, or view existing comments
  • Review the Survey Genius details
  • Preview how your survey looks in the Desktop, Tablet, and Phone device views

You can choose the Survey Format to present your survey to respondents from the Design survey tab.

  • Previewing Your Survey Logic

You can invite others to give feedback on your survey design by sharing the survey preview link or sending an invitation to comment. There can only be 100 comments per account, including deleted ones, on a survey.

If you want others to edit your survey design and work on surveys with you, check out our other collaboration features.

The Share for review button lets you share your survey preview for anyone to review, even if they don’t have a SurveyMonkey account. People can preview your survey and click on the comment icons to leave comments. 

If you want to try out collecting responses, you can create a collector to use as a test. It includes your collector options and lets you experience the survey the way your respondents will see it.

When you take the survey using your test collector, it records test responses that you can view in the Analyze Results section. This way you can see how your data looks before you send out the survey.

To create a test collector:

  1. Go to the Collect Responses section of your survey.
  2. Create a collector for the survey—we suggest using a Web Link.
  3. Rename your collector "Test Collector" so you don't confuse it with your real collectors.
  4. From the collector options, turn on Multiple Responses. This allows you to test the survey more than once.
  5. Choose your remaining collector options.
  6. Copy the URL you created and paste it in your browser's address bar.
  7. Take the survey.
  8. Go to the Analyze Results section of the survey to see how your data looks.
  9. Make any edits to the survey design or collector options, as needed.
  10. Clear the responses from the collector once you're done testing so they don't interfere with your survey results.

TIP! If you're using Email Invitation or Text Message collectors, you can send a test email or test text to preview how your message appears in your email client or mobile text app.