Online surveys: advantages and disadvantages

Online survey today is the most popular way to study the target audience, and collect opinions and feedback from consumers. But in order to effectively create a survey online, it is important to know the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys.

Advantages and additional features

Online surveys provide researchers with many benefits. Some of them are:

•  ease of creation and distribution;
•  low cost of research;
•  large audience coverage;
•  automatic data analysis.

If you wonder how to create a survey, you do not need to know programming languages. Interactive questionnaires are created by a visual designer: they can include photos, diagrams, drawings, video, and audio files. The questionnaire can be designed in the corporate style of the brand, adding a logo and other elements of the brand book.

The researcher can use a wide range of channels to distribute questionnaires. The link to the questionnaire can be sent by e-mail, via instant messengers, in an SMS message, and published on social networks. The questionnaire is easily embedded on a website page or mobile application, it can be displayed in a pop-up window or in a push notification. For the questionnaire, you can generate a QR code and use it in printed materials.

Disadvantages of an electronic survey

The main disadvantages of online surveys are:

•  the impossibility of verifying the identity of the respondent;
•  lack of communication with the interviewer when filling out the questionnaire;
•  inactivity of survey participants.

Of course, it is impossible to reliably verify who exactly fills out the questionnaire via the Internet. However, it is possible to provide a number of questions in the questionnaire that will help to indirectly control the identity of the respondent. Most services provide protection against repeaters, allowing you to limit the number of participants and the duration of the event.