Building a Survey: Types, Questions and Preview

Create a survey with New survey in the survey library. The builder has five steps, Template, Questions, Targeting, Trigger and Theme, and you can click any of them at any time. A tick replaces the number of each step you have finished.

Continue stays disabled until the current step is valid, and the reason is written under the buttons. On the last step, Continue becomes Create survey, or Save changes when you are editing a survey that already exists.

Template: choose what you are measuring

The first step asks "What do you want to measure?" and offers four types. NPS, CSAT and CES are standard instruments, each with its own scale and standard wording, so a survey you do not change further is still a correctly built one. Custom is your own mix of questions.

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): loyalty, on a 0–10 scale. Best asked after a completed purchase or a support interaction. Starts with "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" and an optional follow-up, "What is the main reason for your score?"
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction): satisfaction, on a 1–5 star scale. Best asked immediately after a specific interaction. Starts with "How satisfied are you with your experience?" and an optional follow-up, "What would have made this better?"
• CES (Customer Effort Score): effort, on a 1–7 scale. Best asked after checkout or a self-service task. Starts with "How easy was it to get what you needed today?" and an optional follow-up, "What made it easy or difficult?"
• Custom: your own questions, up to five, any of them optional. It starts with an example to edit: a rating on the 1–5 star scale, a multiple choice question "What did you come here to do?", and a text question "Anything we could do better?"

The same step asks for an Internal name, up to 256 characters. It starts as the type's full name, such as Net Promoter Score. Visitors never see it, so make it as specific as your library needs.

On a new survey, picking a different type starts the survey again from that type's template. On a saved draft, picking a different type replaces only the type and the questions. Once a survey has been started, its type cannot change.

Questions

A survey has up to five questions, shown to visitors one at a time. On NPS, CSAT and CES surveys the score question comes first and is always required. The question types, choice options, optional questions, scale labels and reordering are covered in Writing Survey Questions, Options and Texts.

Targeting, Trigger and Theme

The last three steps decide who can see the survey, when it appears and what it looks like. Each has its own guide: Choosing Who Sees a Survey, Choosing When a Survey Appears and Survey Appearance: Position, Colour and Corners. The Theme step also holds the widget texts, covered in Writing Survey Questions, Options and Texts, and the frequency limits, covered in How Often a Visitor Sees a Survey.

What a new survey starts with

If you change nothing after picking a type, the survey uses that type's questions, can show to every visitor on every page, appears after a 10 second delay, sits in the bottom right corner, uses the accent colour #2563eb with 12px corners, shows the standard English button texts, and asks a visitor who dismisses it at most twice, 30 days apart.

The preview

A preview sits beside the form and updates as you edit. Use the arrows above it to step through the questions one at a time, as a visitor would. It shows your questions, options, scale labels, Next and Submit texts, accent colour, corner radius and position, and the Powered by Pertento mark. It does not show the thank-you message or the close button.

The preview is a representation, not the shipped widget: the real one renders on your page in its own isolated container, so your site's styles cannot change it.

Finish with Create survey. The survey is saved as a draft, and nothing reaches your site until you start it and the website is next published. See Starting, Ending and Managing Surveys.