Benchmarks

Benchmarks add context to your survey results by comparing your responses with others who asked the same Question Bank questions. Your survey results include benchmarks for the Question Bank questions you’ve used which have available benchmark data. 

We’re also working to continuously improve the benchmarks experience, which may be available for additional survey questions in the future.

Benchmark data comes from SurveyMonkey customers who use benchmark questions in their surveys. To calculate a benchmark, we aggregate the responses across surveys for each benchmarkable question, then average those responses to generate the question’s score.

To preserve privacy, responses for a given question are aggregated and de-identified to create a set of average statistics about that question—we don't disclose any individual responses, personal information, or organization names.

Check out our Privacy Notice for more on how SurveyMonkey handles your personal information and data.

You can include benchmarkable questions in your survey by using our Question Bank, or with specific survey templates.

Our Question Bank contains hundreds of questions created and certified by survey methodologists. 

To see the Question Bank questions with benchmarks available:

Certain questions from our Question Bank will let you customize text using a dropdown menu. However, editing the question text outside the dropdown can invalidate the benchmark comparison, since respondents might interpret your question differently than the original version.

If you make additional changes to the question type, or the number of answer options for a benchmarkable question, it will remove the option to view that question’s benchmark in Analyze results.

To see the expert templates with benchmarks available:

You don't need to use every question in the expert template, but the more benchmarkable questions you include, the more comparison data you'll see in your results. Some templates may have additional questions that aren't benchmarkable. Feel free to add, edit, or delete questions to customize and style your survey.

You can see benchmarks in Analyze Results for any surveys with benchmarkable questions, once your survey has gathered at least one response.

If you use an NPS question in your survey, you’ll automatically see the global benchmark score below your summary data chart. You can use the Benchmarks toggle from the question settings to hide or show benchmarks.

For other benchmark question types, you can select the benchmark icon at the top of the question window to show the available benchmark alongside your survey results.

There are some limitations to keep in mind when using benchmarks with the following analyze features:

Anyone with shared access to your survey can view benchmarks in Analyze. When you show or hide benchmarks for a question, those changes apply to everyone with access to the survey.