Using SurveyMonkey for Market Research

In this article
Getting Started
Designing Your Survey
Using Market Research Solutions
Collecting Responses
Analyzing Results

Learn the tips and tricks to conducting market research surveys with SurveyMonkey Audience so you can get the answers you need. Whether you want to keep existing customers or gain new business, you’ll need the right data to back you up.

These resources will help you make sure your market research survey is on the right track.

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Getting Started

Get started using SurveyMonkey Audience to do market research.

Learn how to do market research
Doing market research for the first time? Check out our comprehensive guide on how to do market research. This guide can help you:
- Get an introduction to market research concepts
- Learn how to plan your own project
- Find tips on survey design
- Learn how to target the right people
- Understand survey analysis
- Find out how to act on survey results
Once you feel comfortable planning a study, you can start creating your survey.
When reviewing data from your Audience survey, contact us before deleting responses. We can replace responses that we confirm are low quality.
Reach a target audience
Learn how to use our SurveyMonkey Audience panel to reach your target audience.
- How to Reach a Target Audience
- Buying Responses with SurveyMonkey Audience
Manage your SurveyMonkey team (Administrators)
Managing market research projects and credits across a team? Use our administrator guides to help you set up your team.
(optional) Purchase Audience Credits
Learn how other companies use SurveyMonkey Audience

Designing Your Survey

There are a few requirements to follow when you send your survey through our Audience panel. You can also use a few tips to make your survey more engaging and increase your response rate.

Audience requirements
When you use our Audience panel, your survey needs to follow certain guidelines. Here are a few guidelines to follow:
- Make sure your survey has less than 80 questions.
- Make at least one question required.
- Remove any links that direct people to another website.
- Delete questions asking people for contact info like email, phone number or address.
Review the rest of our SurveyMonkey Audience Design Guidelines while designing your survey.
Refunds are not available for surveys that don't follow our design guidelines. Surveys that include Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or have logic loops won't be refunded.
Best practices for survey design
There are a few things you can do to get a higher response rate:
- Start general, then get specific. Ask more general questions first, then add more specific questions. Add detailed follow-up questions at the end.
- Keep your survey short - ideally 30 questions or fewer. People are more likely to complete a shorter survey and often give higher quality responses.
- Check for bias. Make sure you don't ask any leading questions in your survey.
- Test your survey. Always take your survey before sending it to others. This helps you make sure there aren't any issues before sending it to your audience.
Learn more about creating a great survey.
How long will it take to get my results?
The time it takes to get results will vary based on your survey design. It can take longer to get results if your survey has any of the following:
- 50+ questions of any type
- 5+ open-ended questions
- Dropdown questions
- Block randomization
- Niche targeting

Using Market Research Solutions

You don't always have to start your survey from scratch. SurveyMonkey offers several purpose-built market research solutions to help you get the insights you need in less time. Each solution includes unique analysis features to help you get the most out of your survey data.

Idea Screening Solution (Try it) - Test your ideas early with your target audience.
Feature Importance Solution (Try it) - Figure out what products, features, or attributes matter most to your target audience using MaxDiff (maximum difference) methodology.
Price Optimization Solution (Try it) - Find the ideal price point for your product or service using the Van Westendorp methodology.
Creative and Concept Testing Solutions (Try it) - Test ads, videos, logos, and more with your target audience.

Collecting Responses

When you're done designing your survey, you can start collecting responses. SurveyMonkey Audience offers comprehensive targeting options to make sure you can reach your ideal audience. Our panels are representative of a diverse online population that voluntarily joined a program to take surveys.

The project cost depends on factors like who you want to survey to and how many responses you need. Use our quote calculator to estimate how much your final project will cost.

Estimating qualification rate / incidence rate
To buy responses through SurveyMonkey Audience:
1. After you create your survey, go to the Collect Responses section of your survey.
2. Choose Buy Responses.
3. Set up targeting options, add screening questions, and set the number of responses you need. Learn more about buying responses with SurveyMonkey Audience.
Setting up a Target Audience collector
If your survey has a screening question with disqualification logic, you need to select a qualification rate before completing your order. The qualification rate is the estimated percentage of people you expect to qualify for your survey based on your screening questions. Your qualification rate affects the number of people we send your survey to. Learn more
It's important to do independent research to estimate your qualification rate. There are a few tips you can use:
- Check your company's market research data. Many companies already know roughly what to expect. Try asking colleagues if they know who would have access to data like this.
- Do some quick research online. If you're targeting a well-researched population, there may be industry evidence documented online.
- Run a small test project. You can get a better idea (within a margin of error of +/- 10%) of the qualification rate by surveying just 100 people. This strategy works best if you plan on buying a larger sample and don't mind spending a smaller amount to get a better idea of what your qualification rate might be.
- It's better to estimate a lower qualification rate than you expect to improve the chances of getting the number of complete responses you need.
We aren't able to offer a refund if you misestimated your qualification rate.
Need more advanced targeting?

Analyzing Results

Dive into your results to understand how your target audience feels. There are a few steps you should take when analyzing your survey results.

Clean your data
It's important to remove unhelpful responses before analyzing your results. There are a few things you can do to clean your data:
- If you're sending your survey through our Audience panel, contact us. We can replace responses that we confirm are low quality.
- If you're not using our Audience panel, you can hide responses from people who don't meet your target audience or didn't answer thoughtfully. Learn more about cleaning your data.
Filtering and comparing data
Use filter and compare rules to dig deeper into your data.
- Filter rules allow you to break down your survey results and focus on specific parts of your data. For example, you can filter by question and answer to view respondents who answered a question a certain way.
- Compare rules let you choose two or more answer options from a single question and view them side-by-side. For example, if you include a question in your survey asking people what age they are, you can create a compare rule to view the survey results for each age range.
Learn more about filtering and comparing results in SurveyMonkey.

Feature Importance (MaxDiff)

SurveyMonkey Brand Updates

Price Optimization (Van Westendorp)

SurveyMonkey