Q: How many respondents are lost for each page added to a resort survey?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

Last week we looked at whether the number of questions in a survey impacted the number of people that would both start and finish completing those questions. This week we’re adding the next piece of the analysis: pagination. What effect does each page have on the number of people who drop off and fail to complete an online resort survey? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
For this analysis we used the same data-set as last week (75 resort surveys, 100,000 responses) finding average completion rates of those who actually started to complete the survey. This time, however, we based those averages on how many separate pages the survey spanned.

survey pages chart

Once again, the trend is easy to spot. After staying fairly high (above 99% for one-page surveys), the completion rate quickly drops to right around 90%. Though it was slight, this number appeared to decline for each additional page beyond that.

What This Means
Long story short, adding one page impacts completion rates much more than adding one question. Even having a welcome page before the survey starts with no questions at all dropped the completion rate by about 8 percentage points for the surveys in our sample.

But the lesson is similar to last week because, despite possible dropoff, there is certainly a place for long surveys. Resorts must simply weigh the benefits of greater insight against the cost of incomplete surveys and make the best decision for their situation.