Data is collected in Alchemer surveys when respondents click the Next and Submit buttons at the bottom of each page.
What are some of the consequences of this in surveys?
Partial Responses With No Data
Responses are marked as partial in Alchemer when the survey respondent clicks the Next button on the first page thus submitting data to our database. If you have required questions on the first page, if a respondent clicks the Next button (even without answering a single question on the page) this will record a partial response with no data.
Thank You Pages Do Not Have Back/Next Buttons
If you take a quick preview of the Thank You page in a survey, you will see that the Thank You page has neither a Next or a Back button. This is because Thank You pages are terminal pages, used by the Alchemer system to mark the response as complete. This means they are unable to collect data; hence, questions or actions that collect data cannot be added to Thank You pages.
How does Save and Continue affect when and how data is collected?
If you are using the Save and Continue Survey Setting, when the user clicks the Save button after entering their email address, the page will be submitted and sent to our database. This means that data on the same page will be saved.
Note: The behavior for email campaign links is a little different. For email campaign links, data is only saved up to the page on which the respondent last clicked Next. This is true for email campaign links even if the Save and Continue Survey Setting is turned on.
When Will the Data Be Available in the Application?
It is important to note that there is a difference between captured data and processed data. Response data is subject to response processing, which can vary based on server load. If you are looking to access response data, the time between when a response is submitted and when the data is available in Individual Responses, Reports, or Exports can be upwards of 5 minutes.
