Pros and Cons of Conducting a WordPress Survey Plugin

What are the pros and cons of conducting a survey?

1. Pros:

   1. It’s easy to do and quick to create
   2. It has a wide reach
   3. It saves you money on research costs
   4. You can do it via mail, email, online, telephone, and verbal methods
   5. It can quickly show you trends in the market
   6. It gathers large and significant data

2. Cons:

   1. Survey fatigue could lead to response bias
   2. Making the wrong questions can lead to inaccurate data
   3. Respondents may skip answers or quit in the middle of a survey
   4. Not the best method to use to gather info on a controversial topic
   5. The answers you provide must reflect the possible answers of the respondents
   6. Surveyors can be biased as well

 

So you’ve finally installed your WordPress survey plugin and you’ve even picked out a WordPress template for your website. Now, it’ll be just a matter of placing the right questions and getting the feedback you need right? Wrong!

We often talk about the pros of conducting a survey. But now it’s time to talk about its cons and find out ways you can turn them around and make them work for you. However, the reality is a number of them cannot be simply converted into advantages; a few of them you just have to live with, which means that you have to be aware of them beforehand so you could manage your expectations. After all, you wouldn’t want your WordPress survey plugin to go to waste.

Let’s get to it then; here are the pros and cons of conducting a survey:

Pros of Conducting a Survey

There are many advantages you could get by conducting a survey. These are the following:

1. It’s easy to do, especially with an online one via a WordPress survey plugin.
2. It’s also very quick to create.
3. Depending on how you do your survey, it could save you a lot of money in research.
4. In relation to the last item, it can be done in many different ways! These include:

• Online
• Mobile
• Mail
• Email
• Telephone
• Personal interview

5. When done online, it can be conducted from anywhere and also reach different places. You don’t have to be limited by your location! Also…
6. Online surveys usually come with analyzers and computations that will help you make sense of the answers you get and show you trends in your audience.
7. Not to mention, the answers you gather will represent a large portion of your market, making the data very vital to your operations.
8. You can ask as much questions as you want! Just be sure that it’s not too long and make sure to ask the right questions as well.
9. You can collect data that will tell you about your respondents’ opinions, values, personalities, etc.
10. With a well-made survey, you can get precise results that you can use to improve your business/website/etc.
11. If you make your survey standard, then all respondents will answer the same question, which eliminates bias.
12. Most online surveys protect personal information.

Cons of Conducting a Survey

Much like anything else, conducting a survey also has its disadvantages, and they are the following:

1. There is this thing called survey fatigue. This is the bias respondents have that makes them answer a survey dishonestly.
2. Question wording is everything. Do this wrong and you may turn off respondents or even offend them. That being said…
3. It’s not the best way to gather data if the topic is controversial.
4. Respondents may not know the answer to your question.
5. Sometimes they even skip questions; giving you incomplete data.
6. You have to know how to ask the right questions to get useful answers.
7. People can quit a survey midway or even just give random answers for the sake of being done with it.
8. Using something like a Likert scale is useful for getting accurate opinions, but these could give answers that can have multiple interpretations. You may opt for a binary-type question instead but…
9. “Yes” or “No” questions might not provide you with the data you need, especially when you’re asking for feedback about what you are offering.
10. Customizing online surveys or picking a complicated WordPress template for your survey can lead to some errors when it is gathering information.
11. You have to be sure that you also provide the right answers, especially since most survey templates on WordPress encourage you to use multiple choice.
12. You can also be biased when making your surveys and asking questions that aren’t exactly relevant to your audience.

Should You Still Conduct a Survey?

As you can see above, there are many cons just as much as pros of conducting a survey. So the question is: should you still conduct a survey? The answer is yes!

Take a look at number 10 under the pros. The keyword there is “well-made.” This means that as long as you know exactly how to make your survey, it will still be the feedback machine you need for your business and/or website. Also mentioned above is that you could learn how to turn the disadvantages into advantages for the betterment of your company/website.

 

Key Takeaway

We made this article just to be real with you: making a survey is easy, but making an effective one is not. Luckily, we have multiple blog posts that can teach you how to work around the many cons of conducting a survey.

Be sure to look though our blog to find what you’re looking for or email us and tell us what topic you’d like for us to make a blog about!