Surveys
See the Glossary for what a Survey is. Responses from real people and simulated Personas stay together so you can compare what people said with what your Personas predicted.
Surveys live under User Studies and belong to the Application you are researching.
Choose the questionnaire source
Section titled “Choose the questionnaire source”Start a Survey in either of two ways:
- Create — Build the questionnaire in Marketrix.
- External — Provide the URL of an existing survey.
Internal questionnaires are one flat, ordered list built from four question types:
| Question type | What the respondent does |
|---|---|
| Open text | Types a free-form answer. |
| Single select | Picks one option. |
| Multi select | Picks any number of options. |
| Rating | Picks a number on a scale you define. |
Two more question types exist for analysis and reporting. Ranking orders a list of options from most to least preferred. Conjoint picks one alternative in each of a series of choice tasks, each alternative built from attribute levels. They arrive through an imported questionnaire rather than the question builder above.
Each answer is capped: an open text answer holds up to 10,000 characters, and a multi select, ranking, or conjoint answer holds up to 64 entries. A single submission can carry up to 200 answered questions. A respondent hitting a cap sees their submission refused rather than silently truncated.
Every option needs a label. Once a question has answers, you can still add or rename its options, but not remove them, and a rating’s scale is fixed. A question counts as answered as soon as anyone answers it through the published link, even while you are editing the questionnaire. Deleting a question that has answers first asks Delete this answered question? Deleting removes the question from the Survey. Answers from submitted runs are kept; answers not yet in a submitted run are deleted.
When an external Survey’s questions are not yet known, its first external run opens the linked page in a real browser, answers it, and saves the discovered questions in Marketrix. Once the questions are known, later simulated runs answer the internal questionnaire by default. Turn on the external option for an individual run only when you want Personas to answer the linked page again.
Collect organic responses
Section titled “Collect organic responses”Use Publish on the study’s Responses tab to create the respondent link at /survey/{ref}. Anyone with the link can answer without a Marketrix account. You can optionally protect the link with a password of 4 to 256 characters.
The questionnaire has to be ready first: publishing needs at least one answerable question, and an external Survey additionally needs its discovery run to have completed. The panel says which of those is outstanding and offers the action that clears it.
The same dialog lets you collect each respondent’s email, set the thank-you message shown after submission, and give a Redirect after submission URL. A respondent who submits lands there instead of on the thank-you screen. A person’s response is recorded only when they submit the questionnaire, and submitted responses are labeled Organic.
Unpublish closes the link. Responses already collected are kept, and publishing again reopens the same link rather than minting a new one.
What a respondent sees
Section titled “What a respondent sees”| Situation | What appears |
|---|---|
| Password-protected link | “This survey is password protected”, asking for the password before the questionnaire loads. |
| Wrong password | “Incorrect password. Try again.”, with another chance to enter it. |
| Too many wrong attempts | “Too many attempts. Please try again in a minute.” |
| Link unpublished | “Survey closed” — “This survey is no longer accepting responses. Contact whoever sent you the link.” |
| Link never existed | “Survey not found” — “This survey is no longer available. Contact whoever sent you the link.” |
| Link expired or otherwise invalid | “Link no longer valid” — “This link is no longer valid. Ask whoever sent it for a new one.” |
| The survey can’t load | “Could not load this survey. Check your connection and try again.”, with a Try again button. |
| A required question has no answerable input in this build | “Survey cannot be answered here” — “This survey cannot be answered here. Contact whoever sent you the link.” |
The first three let the respondent try again on the same page; the rest end the visit.
Run simulated responses
Section titled “Run simulated responses”Choose Personas and start a Survey run to have them answer in character. Runs use the saved internal questions unless you explicitly turn on the external option for that run.
Simulated Survey runs require at least one Persona. Their submitted responses are labeled Simulated and appear alongside organic responses from the same Survey.
Read results
Section titled “Read results”Every User Study has the same three tabs:
- Overview — the study, questionnaire source, and run history at a glance.
- Responses — individual organic and simulated submissions.
- Reports — response totals and per-question analysis.
A Survey has no fourth tab. Publishing is one action taken about the organic responses, so the Publish button sits on the Responses tab and opens the Publish Survey dialog described above.
In Reports, select Organic, Simulated, or Both to analyze human responses, Persona responses, or the combined result. The filter keeps the two sources explicit rather than blending them without notice.
A response is the full set of Survey Answers one Respondent gave in one sitting; per-question analysis in Reports groups Survey Answers by question across every response. Simulated respondents’ answers are metered by the inference that produced them, alongside Simulations and Persona Reactions; organic answers run no inference and are not metered — see Billing and Credits.