How to quickly create a survey on your site using Google forms?

Sooner or later, almost everyone who has their own website is faced with the need to create feedback forms for collecting data (conducting surveys) from site visitors.

This may be a form in the contacts section, through which site visitors will send you questions of interest to them, there may be a form for collecting requests from customers (for example, applications for a callback or applications for purchasing goods), or it may be a form for conducting a survey or voting topic of interest to you.

There are several approaches to creating such forms:
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• Forms can be made using HTML tags and tie the “Send” button with sending the entered data to you by email

• You can make a bunch of PHP + MySQL (or any other programming language and database) and save all the entered data to the database for further work.

• If your site is made using any popular CMS (for example, Joomla, Drupal or WordPress), then you can search the network for plugins, modules and components that simply allow you to create forms

• And you can use free tools from well-known Google.Docs to create feedback forms.

And in this article, I would like to show how using Google.Docs you can easily and quickly create all kinds of survey forms for your sites.

So, let's begin!

The first thing you need to do is log in to your inbox in the Gmail mail service (in your google account): https://accounts.google.com/

Next, in the upper vertical menu, select Disk.


On the opened page in the left vertical menu we press the button “Create” and from the drop-down list select the item “Form”


Then we find ourselves in the free form editor from Google.Docs, and it is in it that we will create our forms.

In the first window, the google form editor asks us for the name of our future form and offers to choose a theme from existing themes.


After the name is entered and the choice of themes is made, click the "OK" button, and we get to the edit page of our form.

I will not talk about all the features and settings of Google’s form editor in this article, because Most of the things are known by the “spear method”, plus to everything, there is not the worst help from Google: support.google.com/drive/bin/topic.py?hl=ru&topic=1360904&parent=2811744&ctx=topic . Here I want to dwell only on those points that need to be known in order to create my first form right now.

So, here is the Google form editor interface:


At the top of the editor there is a small horizontal menu that is responsible for the basic settings of the form. In it, you can change the design theme, change the settings for saving the entered data (save to a new Google.Docs table or to a new tab of an existing table), and also open the created form for viewing by clicking on the Open Form button

Remark: Be sure to set the save settings by clicking on the "Save Answers" button. If you select “New table” in the saving settings, Google will automatically create for you a new table, the name of which will coincide with the name of the form you created and the postscript (Answers)

Below are the visibility settings of your form. Using these settings, you can allow viewing the form for everyone (uncheck all the checkboxes), or vice versa, make the form available only to users of this domain and you will need to be authorized to fill it out.

With visibility settings, be careful. Although of all the settings there are only two checkboxes, but if you make a mistake in them, then your entire survey can fail, people simply will not get access to the form.

Next, there are buttons for editing the element added to the form. You can at any time change the signature to the form element, hint (explanation), change the type of the element (Google offers us a choice of 7 different elements, from a simple clock input field of data to a whole two-dimensional array of radiobutton elements), any element can be made mandatory for filling, etc.

At the very bottom of the page with the editor is the “Confirmation Change” block. In it, you can allow the form to be re-filled, make a visible link to the results of the survey for everyone, allow respondents to change their answers after filling out and change the confirmation text that will be displayed to all respondents who completed the survey form.

The possibility of changing the text to be displayed after filling out the form will give you the opportunity not only to thank the respondent who completed the survey more refined, but also, for example, to give him a link to download some gift as a reward for the work done.

After all the required form fields have been added, in the top menu click on the “Open form” button and you will see your creation with all the elements and input fields:


Then you can send your created survey form by mail, give the respondent a link to this form or embed it in your website.

Embedding in the site is elementary. You just need to select the item “File-> Embed into a web page ...” in the top menu of the form editor and the system will generate an iframe for you to insert into your website, blog, etc.


That's it, our new form of survey of site visitors is ready!

All data completed by respondents will be available to you in the tables of Google.

In addition, at any time you can see the general statistics on the dynamics of filling in the fields of your new form in the section of the top horizontal menu “Answers-> Summary of Answers”:


As you can see, this tool is quite flexible in settings and allows you to create and conduct a survey of your website visitors or any other group of respondents in a matter of minutes.

In this case, you do not need to type out the HTML form yourself, you do not need to organize interaction with the database, you do not need to search for suitable plugins, modules and components for your CMS. And also there is no need to code interfaces for displaying statistics with the display of survey results.

Plus, if you throw a lot of traffic on a similar survey form, then Google server will most likely withstand it!

Yes, and all the data entered by respondents polled will always be available to you in your Google account.