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How to Set up Branching in a Survey

Branching in surveys offers you a way to personalize every survey taker's experience. It lets you decide which question appears next based on an answer given for the previous question.

Benefits of branching in a survey:

• Get detailed insights with follow-up questions
• Filter out questions that are unimportant to a particular respondent
• Branching personalizes every survey taker’s experience
• Improve survey completion rates by keeping surveys short and to the point

Here’s a quick example of how branching works:

Q. Are you satisfied with our service?

A. Yes
B. No

If the survey taker answers 'A,' you can present a follow-up question, such as: 

Great! Would you mind sharing what you liked the most about our product/service?

However, if the user answers 'B,' you may want to ask them an open-ended follow-up question, such as:

Thank you for your feedback! What’s that one thing we can improve to make your user experience delightful?

This example explains how branching helps you get detailed insights from your customers.

Branching in ProProfs Survey Maker works in two ways:

1. Apply it to individual answers in ‘Multiple Choice’ and ‘Choose From List’ question types.
2. Apply it directly to the question.
3. Use the Page Break feature.

1. Apply it to individual answers in ‘Multiple Choice’ and ‘Choose From List’ question types

As shown below, when customizing a multiple-choice question, enable the option ‘Branch based on answer’ under the ‘Advanced’ section. Then, select a branching option against each answer. Similarly, you can apply branching to a ‘Choose From List’ question as well.

2. Apply it directly to the question.

You can apply to branch directly to the question when customizing the following question types: Checkbox, Text Box, Name, Email, NPS Scale, Rating Scale, Button, Grid of Choices, Ranking, Date/Time, Draw, Address, Phone, Upload, Slider, and Selfie.

Let’s take an example of a ‘Checkbox’ question as shown below. Under the ‘Advanced’ section, use the ‘Jump To’ dropdown menu to apply branching to the question. No matter the user response, the survey will proceed according to the branching option applied by you.

3. Use the Page Break Feature

Suppose you have questions with branching in your survey, and you choose to show all the questions on the same page to the survey taker. It’s bound to leave them confused.

That’s because branching allows you to land the user to specific questions based on their response to the previous question, and displaying all the questions on the same page may result in a poor user experience.

To tackle this, you can use the page break feature to guide the survey taker to only the relevant questions.

To add a page break:

• Click ‘More’ on the left panel

• Click ‘Page Break’ under ‘Other’ to add it after a branching question.

Here’s how a page break looks like in the Survey Maker editor.

After adding the page break, you can preview the feature from the survey taker’s perspective by clicking the 'Preview' button.