Adding branching in surveys

Branching is used to have respondents skip certain questions that are not relevant to them. This allows you to create different routes through your survey, guiding respondents based on their responses or profile.

For example, you may have a number of questions about the respondents children. If the first question is ‘How many children do you have?‘ and the respondent indicates ‘none‘, then there is no reason to show that respondent the other children related questions. Just skip them to the next section. The respondent sees fewer questions and thus has a greater chance of reaching the end of the survey.

Branching is page based. Meaning, after the respondent clicks on the ‘Next’ button at the bottom of the page, which page should the respondent see next?

You can branch to question pages in your survey, the thank-you page, the alternative thank-you page or a URL. The latter can be useful for branching to another survey, a website, etc.

1. Sign in to CheckMarket.
2. Click on the tab Surveys.
3. Open your survey.
4. Click on Edit.

Under each page is a Branching button . Click on it to open the branching window.

A branch consists of one or more conditions. A condition is a set of criteria. If the criteria are met, then the condition is true. If the conditions of a branch are met then the branch is true and the respondent will be sent to the target page set in the branch.

Below is an overview of the different parameters which make up a branch and its conditions:

When the branching window first opens, you see an option to add a branch to the page and the optional Else branch, which allows you to optionally select a page where you want to send the respondent if he doesn’t fulfil the conditions of any of the other branches (or when there aren’t any other branches).

Select from the Go to dropdown(1) the target page where the respondents need to go when they met the condition(s) of the branch.

The branching condition is based on two types:

• Question – The answer on an earlier question.
• Respondent field – Data from the respondent (Socio-demographic, address data, custom fields, …).

Select the type you want from the Type dropdown (2).

Select from the Select question/field dropdown (3) the question or respondent field on which you want to base your condition.

Depending on the context you have the choice of different operators to set different criteria like: “is”, “is not”, “contains”, “does not contain”, “greater than”, “less than”, etc. Choose an operator from the Select operator dropdown (4) to further complete your condition.

Choose an answer from the Select value dropdown (5) or fill in the text field that the condition needs to match.

By clicking on Add condition (9) you can add as many extra conditions you want. Using the AND/OR-operator (7) you can indicate if some or all the conditions need to be matched.

You can add extra branches by clicking on Add branch (10). Removing branches (6) or conditions can be done by clicking on the crosses.

Saving your branches can be done by clicking on the Save button below in the window.