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How to Add a How Did You Hear About Us Survey in WordPress

Do you want to learn how to add a How did you hear about us survey in WordPress?

You’ve come to the right place! These surveys, also known as acquisition surveys, are an excellent way to discover where your new customers are coming from. This information can help you truly understand your target audience.

By adding the survey to your checkout page, you can make it quick and easy for your customers to answer the question.

🔎 In this article, we’ll cover:


What Are Acquisition Surveys?

Acquisition or “How Did You Hear About Us” surveys are a type of survey used by businesses to gather information about how customers found out about their products, services, or brand. These surveys are often implemented during the customer acquisition process, such as when visitors are making a purchase or signing up for a service.

The survey questions can be customized to fit the specific needs of the business. Common questions include:

  • “How did you find out about our website?”
  • “What led you to choose our product/service?”
  • “Did someone refer you to our company? If yes, who?”
  • “Which marketing channel influenced your decision to purchase from us?”

By collecting responses to these questions, businesses can track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts across different channels such as search engines, social media, referrals, advertisements, or word-of-mouth.

Why Use a How Did You Hear About Us Survey?

The purpose of these surveys is to identify the various channels through which customers discovered the business. By asking questions about how they heard about the company, businesses can gain insights into their marketing effectiveness and understand which channels are driving the most customer acquisition.

Acquisition surveys are valuable tools for businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing strategies. The information gathered from these surveys can help them allocate resources more effectively, focus on the most successful channels, and tailor their marketing campaigns to reach their target audience more efficiently.

Add a How Did You Hear About Us Survey

Ready to get started? In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to add a How did you hear about us survey in WordPress.

Step 1: Install EDD and Acquisition Survey

First, get an Easy Digital Downloads Personal Pass.

Once EDD is installed on your WordPress website, you’ll have a new left-hand side menu tab called Downloads on your WordPress dashboard.

The items you create and sell are called ‘Downloads’ in EDD. On this menu tab, you manage your store, with ease, all within the WordPress admin:

Screenshot: new Downloads menu item

Go to Downloads » Extensions. The Acquisition Survey extension is the first option:

The Acquisition Survey extension to create how did you hear about us survey in WordPress.

Select Install. The addon will automatically be activated.


Step 2: Customize How Did You Hear About Us Survey

After this, navigate to Downloads » Settings » Extensions » Acquisition Survey:

Screenshot: EDD Extension Settings
  1. Survey Title: this is the title that will appear above the dropdown list. We suggest one of these typical ways of asking and keeping it short:
    • “How did you hear about us?”
    • “How’d you heard about us”
    • “How did you find out about us?”
    • “How’d you find us?”
  2. Require Survey Response: decide if you want the field to be required to make a purchase or just optional.
  3. Acquisition Methods: EDD pre-builds a list with common ways site visitors find you (marketing channels). You can add or remove sources however you want. Be sure to include as many possible ways your customers could have found you. If the list gets to be over 8-10 consider how to make them more generic by grouping them. See below for more ideas.
    • There is a separate text field for Method Name and Unique ID. You can just enter text into Method Names and EDD will automatically create Unique IDs (with no capital letters, spaces, and hyphens between words).
  4. Hit Save Changes when you’re done. You can change this at any time.
Screenshot: EDD Acquisition Methods

On your checkout screen, you’ll see your Survey Title and a drop-down with your Acquisition Methods in the Personal Info section. It’s so easy to use, most of your customers won’t think twice about giving you this valuable treasure of information. 🎉

Screenshot: survey question on frontend

If you need further assistance, you can check out our Acquisiton Survey Setup Documentation.

Ideas For How to List Acquisition Methods

Here are possible acquisition methods / marketing channels / sources you could add to your survey. Think through what ways people can find your website.

  • Social media
    • Specify which network (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok)
      Or group as one
  • Search engine
    • Google search
    • Bing Search
  • Customer review sites (like Capterra and G2 Crowd, bear in mind you may have listings on sites like this without even realizing it)
  • Word of mouth (or affiliate referral)
  • Email
  • Ad
    • Specify which type of ad (print, web, radio, TV)
      Or group as one

Step 3: How to View Entries

Good work so far. Don’t stop there. Next, you want to be able to see customer entries to learn and improve your marketing campaigns. EDD makes that super simple.

Acquisition Report

On your WordPress dashboard head over to Downloads » Reports and select Acquisition from the dropdown list. Then click the Show button on the right:

Animated Screenshot: Acquisition survey report switch

You’ll see a report on the user-reported source (acquisition method) of each purchase on your store (since installing the plugin).

Screenshot: EDD Reports filtered by acquisition

Payment History ‘Payment Meta’

Any time you are looking at the order details from a customer, you can see the source/acquisition method.

Look under Downloads » Payment History. Hover over any payment (purchase) and click View Order Details. This will bring up a detailed report of each transaction.

Screenshot: Payment History

On the right-hand side look for the Payment Meta box. This is where information about each order is stored. You’ll see Acquisition in addition to other information (which gateway (payment processor/option), transaction key, IP address of the customer at time of purchase, and Transaction ID).

Screenshot: Order details: Payment Meta

Step 4: The Final Result

With Easy Digital Downloads and our Acquisition Survey extension, you’ll get smarter with each sale you make. Each customer can have the option, or be required, to provide you with valuable data to grow your business.

Animated Screenshot: Final result acquisition survey

EDD is purpose-built for digital creators like you to sell with ease, while having endless customization and flexibility as you grow.


FAQs: How Did You Hear About Us Surveys

Is it possible to export the survey responses for further analysis?

Yes, Easy Digital Downloads offers export functionality for survey responses. Within the Reports section of the plugin, you can generate reports and export the data in various formats, such as CSV or Excel. This allows you to perform in-depth analysis using external tools or share the data with your team.

Can I integrate the survey data with third-party analytics tools?

Absolutely! Easy Digital Downloads integrates with popular analytics tools like Google Analytics via MonsterInsights. By connecting your analytics account, you can combine the survey data with other website metrics, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your audience and their referral sources.

Bonus: How To Learn Even More

Now that you’re thinking about gathering customer feedback like ‘how’d you find us’, you may be thinking that you want MORE.

You may want to ask more survey questions with more answer options to gain other actionable insights. What you want is to understand the customer experience.

For this send more customized and detailed surveys with a form builder. We recommend WPForms.

WPForms Logo

WPForms will let you ask different types of questions; predefined choice questions (checkbox, radio box) and free form text (open-ended questions). You can even add conditional logic so that the form asks relevant follow-up questions based on what responses the respondent is giving in real-time.

WPForms is the best way to build forms with WordPress. They have hundreds of templates to make it super simple to make even the most complicated and powerful forms. You’ll love the user experience, it saves you time. There are survey templates for:

WPForms also offers integrations with most popular email marketing platforms and more.

Use WPForms to learn even more about your customers. Take it to the next level.


Conclusion

Fantastic! You’ve learned how to add a ‘how’d you hear about us‘ quick survey to your digital store. We also showed you how to make use of the information you get.

This will help you develop or improve your marketing strategy so you can increase sales.

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