Q: How many survey respondents are lost for each question a resort asks?

With many demands and goals on the table, keeping a survey short can be tricky. Three questions become four, and then five, and then a dozen. But what effect does each additional question have on the number of people that never finish an online resort survey? That was our question, here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 75 resort surveys completed by nearly 100,000 guests. After recording the total response count for the survey, we then tallied the number of people who started filling out the questions but never finished. Here’s how that looks based on the number of questions in the survey.

With just a second of glancing the trend is clear and predictable: More questions lead to fewer completed surveys. But to be more specific for this sample, for every question in a survey, the completion rate decreased by about 0.4 percentage points.

What This Means
While the knee-jerk reaction is to simply make shorter and shorter surveys, resorts must compare their goals to their strategy to make sure efforts are aligned. For example, if you’re looking for operational performance data, longer surveys with very specific questions are critical.

If, on the other hand, you want marketing-focused data, a more concise approach might be the better choice.

That answers the question side of things, but what about pages? Does they impact completion rates as well? Wouldn’t you know it, that’s what we’ll cover next week.