Recurring Surveys
Sending your survey via email? Learn more about sending a recurring email invitation.
Setting up a recurrence makes it easier to regularly share the same survey and gather data over time. This collector option saves you time by automatically creating new Web Links, called Occurrences, at a frequency you choose. What's cool about this setting is that you can easily filter your results by each occurrence to see how people responded differently over time.
1. Design your survey
2. Create a Web Link Collector
3. Turn on Recurrence in your collector options
4. Get email notifications when each new Web Link is ready to share with respondents
5. Share the new link
To create a recurrence:
Once on My Recurrences, you can set up the rest of your collector options in the Template, or grab the link to your survey in the Occurrence.
Tracking Respondents Web Link Collectors track IP addresses, but this information can't really help you track respondents. If you want to be able to match each response with the person who submitted it, add required questions to your survey to collect identifying information from respondents.
When you set up a monthly or quarterly recurrence, the Repeat By setting defines when in the month or quarter you want to receive your new web link. For example:
To get a new web link on the 15th of every month, choose Day of the Month. In the Start Date field, pick the 15th on the calendar.
To get a new web link on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, choose Day of the Week. In the Start Date field, pick the 2nd Wednesday on the Start Date calendar.
You can copy your new web link from the reminder email, or from the collector in your account.
Each new web link is called an Occurrence. Each Occurrence name includes a number so it's easy to tell them apart.
To get your new web link:
We'll send a reminder email each time a new web link is created.
The email is sent to the address entered in the Reminder Email field during setup. By default, the owner email address is pre-populated in that field, but it can be changed. We recommend sending reminder emails to the person responsible for sharing the survey link. The reminder email can only be sent to 1 person and you can't customize the content of the email.
Any edits you make to the Recurrence Template affect future Occurrences only.
To edit your Recurrence:
Auto-Save You have to click Save when you turn on a Recurrence or edit options, but your changes are auto-saved when you turn off a Recurrence.
All Occurrences stay open until you close them. Turning off a Recurrence stops any future Occurrences from being created.
If a collector had a Recurrence turned on at any point, you won't be able to delete the collector—it remains in your collector list.
The default name of each Occurrence includes a sequential number based on when the web link was created, but you can give it a custom nickname if you’d like.
To rename an Occurrence:
To focus in on the results of a specific Occurrences in the Analyze Results section, you can filter by collector.
If you want to export your results, we suggest an All Responses Data export in XLS format so you can easily sort and filter your responses by collector.
| Feature | Limitation |
| Customizing Survey Links | You can't create custom URL endings for the web links in a Recurrence. If you create a Custom URL Ending, the Recurrence is automatically disabled—and vice versa. |
| Custom Variables | Custom variables don't work with Recurrences. Make sure to turn off Custom Variables in your survey design to make sure your Recurrence works properly. |