Response Rate

Your response rate is the percentage of people who respond to your survey.

To calculate the response rate percentage for your survey, use the following equation:

You can find the total number of responses in the Analyze Results section of your survey.

To calculate your response rate based on the number of complete responses to your survey, filter by completeness and select Complete responses. The number of complete responses appears at the top of the page when the filter is applied.

TIP! Learn how to calculate the number of respondents you need or use our sample size calculator.

Improving Your Response Rate

If a large number of respondents don't respond to your survey, or they exit or abandon your survey before completing it, you'll have a low response rate.

In general, you can expect a low response rate if your survey is long, your survey language is complicated, or you send your survey to the wrong audience. Read our tips to ensure you're doing all you can to get the best response rate possible.

Clean Up Your Survey Design
The length and tone of your survey dramatically impact your response rate. If survey is long and your questions are text heavy, respondents can feel overwhelmed and exit your survey.
Keep these tips in mind when designing your survey:
- Keep your survey short—include only the essential questions and answer options. Attention and motivation tend to drop as a survey goes on.
- Use the fewest, shortest words possible to say what you mean. The less respondents have to read, the better.
- Keep your language simple. Aim for a vocabulary you think a young adult would understand and don't use jargon.
- Let respondents skip open-ended questions—don't require open-ended questions. Respondents who don't want to take the time to write a response might exit the survey instead of writing a response.
Target Your Audience
Survey topics may not engage or interest all survey-takers. If someone is uninterested, they may exit your survey and lower your response rate.
You can add a qualifying question to your survey to ensure you're surveying the right people.
Add Skip Logic to your survey to skip people past questions or pages that may not apply to them.
If you're using SurveyMonkey Audience to buy survey responses, read our targeting tips.
Keep Contacts Up to Date
If you know your survey audience personally, let people know that you're planning to conduct a survey, what it's about, and when to expect it.
If you're sending your survey to a list of contacts, either by Email Invitation or through another messaging platform, make sure your contact list is up to date. If your contact list is out of date, you may be missing important contacts whose email addresses have changed, and your messages could bounce.
Send Your Survey Multiple Ways
Test Your Survey
Personalize Email Invitations and Send Reminders
Make sure your survey invitations are inviting—keep them short, simple, and approachable.
Provide a brief introduction about what your survey is about, and how long it will take. If you need to include detailed information, like a privacy notice, consent statement, or survey instructions, include it in a survey introduction instead of your invitation.
If you're sending your survey via Email Invitation, personalize invitations and reminders by including the name of your respondents using custom data tags in your message.

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Improving Your Response Rate

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