Survey Your Visitors Better: Site Survey Tool Ratings
Aug 20th, 2008 by Rich Page
Welcome back! I'm excited and honored to announce that I am going to the be author of a new book called 'Website Optimization - An Hour a Day'! Learn More About the Book
Want to build better websites, and help optimize them? One of the best ways you can help do this is by gaining visitor insight – i.e. by surveying your website visitors to find out exactly what they are looking for.
Setting up simple survey questions like “please rate your experience from 1-5″ is also vital for obtaining and monitoring the ‘pulse’ for your website, and you can use the results in your weekly or monthly reports.
But what tools are available to create and run these surveys? There are very few places online to learn about these tools, and how they compare, so I thought I would create a mini-guide all about online survey tools, and which ones are best to use. So, lets get the ball rolling…
1:QuestionPro
Price: Monthly - $15 for basic, $199 for advanced, $2999 for enterprise.
Functionality: Meets most survey needs, with varying levels of service.
Great for: Creating more advanced surveys, including use of custom variables to collect other user details.
Lacking: User interface could be better, basic level could be more competitive.
Rating: 7/10
2: 4Q
Price: FREE
Functionality: Limited to a predefined set up questions (by design), good for getting a website ’pulse’.
Great for: Getting some great quick visitor insight, with insightful questions.
Lacking: The ability to change the preset questions, and lack customization.
Rating: 7/10
3: Survey Monkey
Price: FREE for basic, for Pro it is $19.95 a month or $200 a year.
Functionality: Great for inexperienced surveyers who are looking to get their surveying feet wet.
Great for: Setting up quick, simple surveys, with simple personalization options.
Lacking: Analysis is very limited, and doesn’t offer many advanced features like popup surveying.
Rating: 6.5/10
4: Omniture Survey
Price: Cost per response generated, and setup fee (call for more details)
Functionality: A more serious, full scale surveying solution, and links well with Site Catalyst traffic data.
Great for: Integrating surveys results into regular website analysis. Great pricing model – you are charged for what results you get.
Lacking: A cheaper option for more simple surveying needs, with limited functionality.
Rating: 7.5/10
5: Opinion Lab
Price: Dependent on amount of sites – $30,000 for first site per year, less for additional sites.
Functionality: Advanced page-based surveying tool – allows you to collect results for each website page.
Great for: Gathering more detailed feedback on each of your website pages, and great analysis options.
Lacking: A cheaper, lower end solution for smaller sites.
Rating: 8.5/10
6: Kampyle
Price: FREE
Functionality: Provides a way to easily gather feedback on your pages.
Great for: Collecting and analyzing feedback on your site, with a fantastic, easy to use interface.
Lacking: An easy way to customize questions asked – needs more surveying type, open-ended questions.
Rating: 8.5/10
7: ForeSee
Price: Customized pricing plans, depending on surveying needs.
Functionality: Best in class surveying solution, even allows you to compare results to competitors.
Great for: Getting the highest level of insight possible.
Lacking: Any options for the smaller scale surveying needs.
Rating: 9/10
8:Survey Gizmo
Price: Basic Level: FREE. Personal: $19 per month. Pro: $49 per month. Enterprise: $159 per month
Functionality: Meets the needs of most survey types, from beginner to advanced survey creators.
Great for: All types of surveys, and includes custom variables to collect other user details.
Lacking: Experience? Relatively new company.
Rating: 9/10
9: SurveyMethods
Price: Basic: FREE. Advanced: $9 per month. Professional: $39 per month.
Functionality: Basic, site surveying tool, similar to SurveyMonkey.
Great for: Setting up simple, quick surveys, for cheap.
Lacking: Advanced options, and lacks good customization options and question options.
Rating: 6/10
So there we have it. A brief overview of the site survey tools that are out there, and the pros and cons of using each of them. I would love to hear everyone’s personal site survey too favorites too!
Nice list. I have shied away from doing surveys because it has seemed complicated to setup and administer. Now it looks easy. Thanks.
Hi! I work with SurveyGizmo and wanted to say thank you for taking the time to review us (and give us such high scores!). Let us know if we can do anything for you or your readers! Thanks ~Brittany
Hi Rich, great list. You mention that Omniture Survey is integrated with SiteCatalyst. My understanding is that at present you can only launch surveys off the SC code but the reporting is not integrated into the interface (unless of course you capture the individual survey elements as custom variables – props or evars).
Has your experience been different?
Thanks,
Michael
Here’s another one you might want to take a look at:
http://www.clicktools.com/
Their pricing model is based on volume of responses stored. I’ve used this on various sites.
We have used Vovici and have been very happy with it.
SurveyGold has a 5-star CNET rating, flat-rate pricing and moves the survey authoring and analysis experience out of the browser to the workstation.
We use Survey Gizmo with excellent results. We looked at many of the companies you have on your list and I have to tell you, for the price and functionality, you can’t beat Survey Gizmo. Omniture, Forsee, and Opinion Labs would all be great choices, but if you want to get data immediately and need an advanced survey platform, check out the free package of Gizmo and work your way up from there.
We have been using Data Illusion’s on-site version of their survey software Feedback Server for over a year with great success, they have various pricing based on-site, hosted and allow you to get the souce code too … you may want to have a look at it at http://www.dataillusion.com
We have started a new website called http://www.surveypirate.com which is a completely free survey tool and in addition to that we will be offering a unique access to the public.(External registers) We are currently in Beta mode for the survey tool and will offer the Access from mid Jan.
Enjoy!
Great List , well impressed. at the moment we actually use a third party company to run our site surveys and since we currently use ominiture hbx to monitor our sites i will look into using omniture site survey.
Hi Rich,
If you update this list at some point in the future, please consider SurveyBob.com. SurveyBob doesn’t compete against the expensive tools, so it doesn’t have some of the features for extremely complex surveys. However, we’ve found that most of the survey needs out there are pretty straightforward, and that people want an easy-to-use tool that is inexpensive or free. SurveyBob.com fits the bill. It is very easy to use, has some great features that set it apart, and unlimited usage is 100% free.
Sincerely,
Aaron Smith
Snap Surveys offers a great and user-friendly survey platform. You can do survey design all the way through to analysis (including email invitations, reminders, erc.) http://www.snapsurveys.com. They also provide free polling software.
there are plenty of other free tools can be helpful as well -
Hi,
we use http://www.polldaddy.com for polls which is 100% free and http://www.surveypirate.com for surveys which is 100% free.
BR/
We use Survey Gizmo and are really impressed with their amount of control and performance. Though we are in their basic free plan, we feel that they are worth to be paid in the future.
survey monkey actually allows popup windows now – just added one to my site and it’s working great. even allows you to only display it to every “n” number of visitors.
Nice list, I was looking for the cost of Opinion Lab, £30kpa, not too high for enterprise level, though I like the idea of free tools!
I have seen a lot of people using Google Docs to create surveys too.
4Q is a great place to start surveying your visitors, then if you feel you need more information, or more control, step up to Survey Monkey.
Crowd Science also has some free survey tools that can be used to get deep profile info on website visitors as well as site satisfaction. crowdscience.com/free_tools