Create (awesome) quizzes
What type of quiz should you create?
QUIZ: “What type of Riddle quiz should you create?”
We divide our 15 content formats into three categories – voting, scored/personality, and ‘special’ (our grab bag for more unique formats).
Voting:
We have several types of polls and surveys. These are designed for quick engagement – easy to create, easy to take. Your audience will love to take them – but they’re not quite as well suited to collecting leads.
(Engagement: ★★★★ / Lead generation: ★★)
- Poll – simple and oh-so-effective. Ask any question using images, audio, or video.
- Multi-poll – our most flexible poll, you can ask multiple questions in many different formats.
- Upvote list – where a poll meets a listicle, your audience upvotes their favorite choices.
- Survey – this is a classic, designed for information gathering with multiple choices and open text answers.
- Reaction poll – the quickest of all our formats, you can create your own poll (like this BBC Sport example) in literally 60 seconds.
Scored quiz:
These quizzes all ask questions with right or wrong answers, but in different ways – and give the user a score at the end (e.g. “You’re awesome – you got 9/10!”).
(Engagement: ★★★ / Lead generation: ★★★)
- Quiz – our classic quiz featuring multiple choice and free text answers. Highly flexible – and super-effective.
- Order it – this takes the standard quiz format a new twist, challenging users to arrange items in the correct order (“Rank these Star Wars films by release date”).
- Tap and find – another interesting take on the quiz, it removes buttons and hides the quiz answers in the quiz image itself (“Geography quiz – tap on the country”).
- Quiz generator – rounding out the list is our newest quiz type features automated quiz creation. You just upload a spreadsheet of questions – and your quiz generator will randomly show new questions to each quiz taker.
Personality test:
Our personality test is in its own category – because it’s such a unique format. Instead of right or wrong answers, personality tests are perfect for assessments or product recommendations – because they return a result based on all the user’s answers.
They take a bit longer to craft – but are well worth the investment, especially for lead generation.
RECOMMENDED: Check out our very in-depth blog post on creating the perfect personality test.
(Engagement: ★★★★ / Lead generation: ★★★★)
And we’re always creating new quiz formats – including these more unusual types:
Journey:
Our journey was inspired by the classic ‘Choose your own adventure’ books – you can each quiz taker different questions, based on their responses.
For example, our ‘What Riddle type should I create?’ quiz above is a journey – and they’re designed for product recommendations (‘What car should I buy?’) or simulations (‘What would you do?’).
Story:
Many of our community asked for a quiz type that was more free-form, where quiz meets blog. The story lets you create text blocks, add videos and multimedia, as well as embed any other Riddle formats for maximum flexibility.
Form:
And rounding out our list is our standalone lead form. Our quiz lead generation builder was so popular – people kept wanting to use it by itself, without any quiz questions.
Three rules for a successful quiz
Rule #1: Use a ‘can’t miss’ title
The title of your quiz is like the cover of a book – you need the right title to grab your audience’s attention, and inspire them to start your quiz or personality test.
Here’s our top tips for creating a quiz title that works:
- Hey YOU…: Simply add the word ‘you’ to your quiz title – it makes it personal, and you’ll get a 23% boost in quiz starts. Compare ‘Take the travel quiz’ with ‘Are you a smart traveller?’ – see the difference?
- Odd numbers are better than even: Another weird one – but using an odd number of questions works better. “Do you know these 9 hardest history questions?” will get 20% more takes than the same quiz saying ‘…these 10 hardest questions.
- Heckle/challenge your quiz takers: This is another key tactic – bland quiz titles don’t get click on. If you try putting in emotion-inducing words – ‘actually’ or ‘really’ are some of our favorites – your quiz will be much more irresistible. You can see the difference with these handy title examples:
- Before: “Are you a safe driver?”
- After: “Are you actually a safe driver?” See how much more engaging that is?
- Keep it short – short titles work the best, by far. We recommend keeping your titles to eight words or so (around 60 characters) – your quizzes will see a 21% better click through rate. It makes sense – at least half of people will see your quiz on smartphones with smaller screens, so short and sweet titles are much easier to read.
You can see these tips in action in this gi-normous list of our 143 top quiz titles (with live examples on various partner sites).
Rule #2: Pick good images
Sure, you can create text only quizzes – but quizzes with images perform significantly better, especially for your main quiz title image.
Our suggestions around choosing the best pictures:
- People over objects: Advertisers use people in their campaigns for a reason. We’re naturally more drawn to pictures with engaging, attractive people.
- Simple subject: You’re creating quizzes for casual browsers – so use clear images that fill the frame, and avoid unnecessary clutter.
- Use stock photos carefully: Stock photos have come a long way – you can use services like Pexels in Riddle for high class, contemporary images. The main thing to avoid? Cheesy pictures will make your quiz look unprofessional and hurt your quiz metrics.
- Audio/video/GIFs rock: The best quizzes embrace multimedia. Keep your quiz fresh with strategically chosen video clips, audio snippets, or animated GIFs. They keep quiz takers engaged and clicking. (Our suggestion – 75% images, 25% multimedia.)
Rule #3: The ‘Three Minute Rule’
Riddle’s easy and fun to use – and it’s very tempting to add more and more questions to a quiz.
But with quizzes, less is empathically more.
Create your quiz for people who in motion – or with short attention spans. They might be on a bus, waiting in line at the store, or just bored – but most quiz takers tune out at the 3 minute mark.
Ideal quiz length: 6-8 questions, with 3-4 answer options each.
Note: there are some exceptions to this – people will be more invested around health-oriented quizzes (‘Are you really depressed?’) or designed for hyper-passionate audiences (like sports). Creating 25-30 questions will work here.