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Survey Flow

Suite

Customer Experience Employee Experience Strategy & Research

Product

Qualtrics

What's on this page

About the Survey Flow

The Survey flow is where you customize the order in which respondents experience the elements of your survey. As the name suggests, it’s where you determine the “flow” of your survey. For a survey with a few blocks of questions, this just means making sure everything’s in the correct order. But your survey flow can also be more complex. You may need to send respondents down customized paths, or need to randomize conditions. Once a survey-taker goes down a special path, maybe they need to be assigned a special value or end the survey early. With the survey flow section of the survey, you can do this and more.

Survey Flow Elements

Yellow menu with a list of elements. Gray block, blue branch, green embedded data, pink randomizer, blue web service, blue text sentiment, blue group, blue authenticator, red end of survey, purple reference surveys, blue table of contents

Elements are the building blocks of the survey flow. They let you do everything from creating personalized paths for respondents, setting up new key variables, or randomizing blocks of questions.

The following is a list of the different survey flow elements available to you, in order of how commonly they’re used. Click the corresponding link to learn more about each element.

Question Blocks: Show a block of questions.
Qtip: See Question Blocks for information on using blocks in the survey flow. See Block Options for information on how to create and edit blocks.
Branches: Display blocks and other elements based on the conditions that survey respondents meet.
Embedded Data: Add any extra information you want to include in the survey data beyond the question responses, such as contact data or other variables you assign by branching.
Randomizer: Randomly present question blocks and other elements.
End of Survey: Terminate respondents at various locations with custom experiences.
Authenticator: Verify respondents’ identities before they take the survey.
Groups: Group different survey flow elements together.
Reference Surveys: Use the same sets of questions in multiple surveys.
Table of Contents: Allow respondents to self-navigate question blocks.
Text Sentiment – Topic: As respondents fill out open-ended feedback in your survey, assess the sentiment of the response, topics used in the response, and the sentiment of those particular topics. Then branch based on the text analysis results.
Web Service: Integrate API calls and web services into your survey.
Experience Agent: Embed an agent to help you resolve customer issues identified in surveys.

Navigating the Survey Flow

To access the survey flow, make sure you are in the Survey tab of your project. Then click the Survey flow icon in the navigation bar on the lefthand side.

to navigate to the survey flow, go to the survey tab and click the survey flow icon on the navigation bar on the left

Here, you’ll see a list of the question blocks in your survey. In basic surveys, you may see just 1 block.

Survey flow. Two gray blocks. First one says show block: intro questions. Second one says show block: main study

Respondents will start at the top of the flow and work their way through each element until they reach an end point and finish the survey.

In addition to blocks, the survey flow can be customized by adding new elements such as branches (used to show certain elements only to those who meet conditions you specify), randomizers (used to randomly choose which elements each respondent will see), and a variety of other elements.

Example: Let’s say we’re surveying customers who just made a purchase in our store, but we only want to study those who bought from us for the first time. In the screenshot below, we have a block of introduction questions, which includes a question about whether this is the survey taker’s first time buying from our store. We then have a branch that catches all the survey takers who have previously made purchases at our store, and sends them to an end of survey element, so the survey stops. Survey takers who don’t meet the branch’s condition will skip the end of survey element and instead head to the “Main Study” block, where we’ll survey them on their first experience with us.

Editing the Survey Flow

Adding Elements

Click Add a New Element Here.

The Add Below button on every block and the Add a New element Here button at the bottom of every Survey Flow

Qtip: If there’s a particular spot in the survey flow where you want your new element to appear, click Add Below.

Choose the element you’d like to add.

What do you want to add? menu opened with Embedded Data highlighted

Moving Elements

Click and hold down Move on the element you’d like to move.

Drag the element to the correct place inside the survey flow.

If you are moving the element under a branch, randomizer, group, or authenticator, make sure you are paying close attention to how elements are indented!

Example: Survey takers will need to meet the conditions of the branch to see the block labeled Condition 1 (Old Logo), but they won’t need to pass the condition of the branch to see the block labeled Follow-Up Questions.

Qtip: You can also move selected elements in the Survey Flow by clicking the element and pressing the ↑ and ↓ keys on your keyboard.

Duplicating Elements

Click Duplicate on an element to copy it. If this element is a branch, randomizer, group, or authenticator, take note that everything indented underneath it will also be copied.

Qtip: If you add a block that’s already in the survey flow and respondents see it twice, the second instance will display all of the same questions with their previous answers filled in. Qualtrics will save the responses from the last instance the block was shown.

Deleting elements

Click Delete on an element to remove it. If this element is a branch, randomizer, group, or authenticator, take note that everything indented underneath it will also be removed.

Warning: Don’t ever delete an element unless you are absolutely sure this is what you want to do! You won’t be able to retrieve any elements you delete, and you will need to rebuild them from scratch. In the case of elements like Embedded Data, you will also delete all corresponding data from your survey.

Saving the Flow

Click Apply to save the edits you’ve made.

Apply button, bottom-right of the screen, in blue

Qtip: If you don’t want to apply your edits, or you made a mistake, simply click Revert to not save the change.

Examples of the Survey Flow in Action

You can do almost anything you want with the survey flow, which can be daunting if you don’t know what you want to do yet. To help you get started, we’ve written a collection of common survey builds that are popular with real Qualtrics users. The ones listed here all utilize the survey flow in some unique way:

Qtip: If you need to see your survey flow better while you edit all the different elements inside, you can use the plus (+) and minus (–) buttons to zoom in and out.

Types of Projects with Survey Flows

Survey flows can be used in many types of Qualtrics projects. These include:

Other Qualtrics projects have survey flows with special considerations.

For Engagement, Lifecycle, Ad Hoc Employee Research, or Pulse projects, please see Survey Flow (EX).
For 360 projects, see Survey Flow (360).

FAQs

How do I display different messages for different participants at the end of the survey?

In the Survey Flow, you can create multiple End of Survey elements, each with a different End of Survey message, and create branches to house those elements. Once made, you can place logic on those branches to specify which respondents go to which End of Survey element. To create these custom survey ending messages,

Open the Survey Flow.

Examine your existing blocks and branches and determine where you want a survey ending.

Click either Add Below or Add a New Element Here, whichever is closest to the spot you want to place the new element.

If you are not already under a branch, add a Branch that sets the conditions for the special end of survey message.

Indented under this branch, add an End of Survey element.

Click Customize and select the Override Survey Options checkbox.

Change the end of survey message from Default to Custom and choose a pre-written message from your library or write a new one.

Click OK and move the End of Survey element to where you need you it (be sure it is within the correct branch for your logic!).

Note that you can add End of Survey elements to each branch if you choose so. If you need a random ending, even on the same branch, you can use the Randomizer element to randomly present a different ending.

A block has a red error message at the top of it saying "Not in Survey Flow". What does this mean?

Blocks in the survey editor do not all have to be used in the Survey Flow. However, only blocks that are in Survey Flow can be seen by respondents, shown/exported in the Data & Analysis tab, or be used in Reports. You can add or remove blocks in Survey Flow at any time without invalidating or losing collected data.

I am having trouble setting up logic to display a question or set of questions to a specific subset of my respondents.

The three types of logic available in Qualtrics are display logic, branch logic, and skip logic. Each of them serve a unique purpose; understanding which type of logic to use enables you to customize each respondent’s survey experience. Display Logic displays or hides a question based on any information you already have about the current respondent. Branch Logic does the same but for blocks of questions or other Survey Flow elements. Finally, Skip Logic sends the respondent to a different part of the survey based on their answer to a specific question. For more details on how to set up your logic, check out our Using Logic support page.

How do I branch my respondents based on today's date?

You can create logic based on when the respondent is taking the survey. This is useful if you have different content you want to show at different times of the year while keeping your data within one survey.

When creating logic based on today's date, you need to save the day, month, and year as separate embedded data fields with your response. You can then use logic based on your embedded data fields to send your respondents down different paths based on today's date.

When creating your embedded data fields, use the following piped text codes for your fields:

Day: ${date://CurrentDate/d}
Month: ${date://CurrentDate/m}
Year: ${date://CurrentDate/Y}

These fields will save your data with a leading zero, i.e. 01 for the 1st day of the month, or 04 for April. Years are saved as a 4-digit number. When finished, your embedded data element should look like this:

Let's run through an example on how to use these fields with branch logic. In this example we want our branch to only include people who are taking the survey in the first half of January. Our logic has three main compontents, one for each piece of the date:

The first two logic statements are to branch people based on the day. Since we're looking for respondents in the first half of the month, we want respondents whose Day is Greater Than or Equal to 01 and Less Than 16.

The next logic statement is for the month. Since we're only interested in respondents in January, we want respondents whose Month Is Equal to 01.

The final logic statement is for the year. The first year we're running this survey is 2021, and we plan on running it for multiple years. Therefore, we want respodents whose Year is Greater Than or Equal to 2021.

Using these logic statements, our branch will capture all respodents who are taking the survey in the first half of January each year.

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