Distributions Tab

Activate your survey, pick your distribution method, and start collecting responses—all from the Distributions tab.

Collecting Responses | Distribution Summary

The Distributions tab is where you activate your survey, start collecting responses, and monitor response collection performance. It provides a variety of ways to distribute your survey, including email, social media, and mobile devices. From the Distribution tab, you can quickly activate a new survey, start gathering responses, and monitor key response collection metrics as they populate.

Review the Distributions Basic Overview help article for more information.

Collecting Responses

By default, you must activate and distribute your survey before you can collect responses. This prevents respondents from taking your survey while you’re still building it. Once your survey is ready to go, head over to the Distributions tab to start collecting responses. With the Distribution tab, you can:

Start, pause, or resume response collection
Set survey availability dates
Understand implications for editing active surveys

See the Collecting Responses help article for information.

Distribution Summary

The Distribution Summary provides an overview of how your survey is performing. It shows how many responses you’ve collected from each distribution channel (i.e., method) and includes an interactive graph so you can see recent response trends at a glance. You’ll also find a table listing all responses collected thus far, making it easy to track your progress in one place.

For more information, visit the Distribution Summary help article.

Distribution Channels

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There are four methods of web distribution:

Anonymous Link

The anonymous link is the URL used to take your survey. You can distribute your survey by pasting this link into an email, onto a website, or into any mode of communication you use with your recipients. Anyone who clicks on the link will be able to take the survey.

It’s called the “anonymous” link because it does not collect identifying information such as name or email address, unless you specifically ask for it in the survey. However, by default, the anonymous link will collect the user’s IP Address and location data based on that IP Address.

See the Anonymous Link help article for more information.

QR Code

A QR code (or Quick Response Code) is a type of matrix barcode that can be printed or shown as an online graphic. QR codes store information—such as web address links—and can be read by mobile devices with a camera. With QR Codes, you can easily target your distribution to mobile device respondents.

Your survey’s QR code is linked to the Anonymous Link. When someone scans this code with a QR Reader app on their mobile device, they will be immediately directed to your survey. This is a convenient distribution option for receipts, posters, and other print media.

See the QR Code help article for more information.

Survey Director

The survey director creates conditional logic that redirects respondents to different surveys or websites from one central link.

See the Survey Director help article for more information.

Passing Information via Query Strings

A query string allows you to pass information to and from a website by simply adding, or “appending,” that information to the end of a URL. This information is stored in the query string and is captured by the website when it reads the URL.

Data can be passed into a survey using a query string. Once passed, the data can be saved as embedded data with the survey response. At the end of a survey, query strings can be used to pass data to another website or survey.

See the Passing Information via Query Strings help article for more information.

Qualtrics provides an easy and convenient way to distribute your survey to large groups of people via email. By using the Qualtrics mailer, you can send customized email invitations to your participants, track their progress, and prevent abuse of your survey.

See the Email Survey invitation help article for more information.

Email Distribution Management

Once you have emailed survey invitations through Qualtrics, you will see a block with your distribution information and actions you can perform on them. Here you can view your distribution details, send Reminder and Thank You emails, cancel or delete distributions, and download the distribution history. These different options allow you to manage your email distribution and monitor progress.

See the Email Distribution Management help article for more information.

Reminder & Thank you Emails

After you’ve invited respondents to take your survey, Qualtrics allows you to send special emails reminding these respondents to finish or thanking them for finishing. The system will recognize who’s finished for you, so you don’t have to worry about setting up a special contact list!

See the Reminder & Thank You Emails help article for more information.

Email Distribution Error Messages

Qualtrics has built in messages to let you know what you need to do to successfully send your emails. The described errors occur for survey invitations, Reminders, and Thank You emails.

See the Email Distribution Error Messages for more information.

Avoid Being Marked as Spam

When sending out any email distribution, one primary goal is to keep your emails from being blocked or directed to the junk folder of your recipients. Essentially, you don’t want your emails marked as spam. If you find that your emails from Qualtrics are consistently being marked as spam, there are a few things you can do.

See the Avoid Being Marked as Spam help article for more information.

Personal Links

For those cases where you need to use a third-party mail system to distribute survey invitations but also need to track which response belongs to which recipient, Qualtrics can generate a list of unique, or “personal,” survey links. These links are tied to specific survey recipients. Names and any other uploaded embedded data will be included with the responses in the results.

When you generate personal links, Qualtrics provides a spreadsheet that contains a row for each recipient including their name and their personal survey link. Most mailing systems can accept such a spreadsheet and will have a mail merge capability to include each recipient’s survey link in their email.

See the Personal Links help article for more information.

Qualtrics SMS distributions help you reach your audience through mobile devices and collect on-the-go feedback. You can send surveys in two different ways through SMS:

2-way interactive SMS: Respondents reply via text message.
Link via SMS: A survey link is sent to be completed in a mobile browser.

See the SMS Distributions help article for guidance on how to set up an SMS survey distribution and best practices for conducting SMS surveys.