How Often a Visitor Sees a Survey

A survey that asks too often trains visitors to close it without reading. Pertento applies a few fixed rules to every survey, plus two settings you choose on the Theme step, under "Appearance, frequency and texts".

The fixed rules

• One survey per session. Once any survey has been shown in a browser session, no other survey is shown in that session. A session here is a browser tab, so a visitor who opens your site in a new tab starts a new one. Later pages in the same tab skip survey work altogether.
• Answered means done. A visitor who submits an answer is never asked that survey again.
• No storage, no survey. The rules above are kept in the visitor's browser storage. If the browser blocks it, as some private browsing modes do, the survey is not shown at all rather than shown without limits.

The two settings

• Maximum prompts per visitor: how many times one visitor can be shown the survey in total, from 1 to 10. The default is 2. Every time it is shown counts, including times the visitor ignored it or left the page.
• Days before re-asking after a dismissal: how long to wait after a visitor closes the survey before it can be shown to them again, from 0 to 365 days. The default is 30.

Both settings only matter for visitors who have not answered. The survey's Overview tab summarises them, for example "At most 2 prompts per visitor, 30 days apart after a dismissal".

What counts as a dismissal

A dismissal is the visitor closing the survey on purpose, with the × button or the Escape key, before answering every required question. Only that starts the waiting period. Escape closes the survey when it is in the center position, or when the visitor's focus is inside it.

If the visitor closes the survey after answering every required question, their answers are submitted instead, and they count as having answered.

A visitor who saw the survey and navigated away without closing it has not dismissed it, so they can be shown it again in a later session, as long as they have not reached the maximum prompts.

Frequency and the share of visitors

The frequency limits are separate from the share of visitors set on the Targeting step. The share decides once whether a visitor can be asked at all; the frequency limits decide how often someone who can be asked actually is. See Choosing Who Sees a Survey.

Several surveys on one website

When more than one survey is running on a website, each page sets up the trigger of only one survey: the first one whose targeting and limits allow it. Which survey that is when several are eligible is not something you can set, so do not rely on an order. If its trigger never fires on that page, for example a dataLayer event that does not happen there, no other survey is tried instead.

Page rules help here: surveys aimed at different pages do not compete with each other.

Testing it yourself

Because these rules live in your own browser, testing a survey repeatedly will quickly stop it appearing for you. See Why Isn't My Survey Showing? for how to reset.