3 min read

Writing a popular online quiz is as much as art as science. They’re taking over the internet – for one simple reason. Quizzes feed into our need to see how we compare with other people – especially about a subject that interests us.

But creating a popular online quiz is more than just coming up with a series of questions.

Here’s our best tips and tricks that will help your quiz go viral:

Why use Riddle to make your popular online quiz?

  1. It’s fun (and easy) – no coding required
  2. Up to 75% of your users will complete your quiz – spending up to five minutes longer on your site.
  3. Quizzes are brilliant for collecting emails and building your marketing list (>25% of all users will sign up).
  4. Grow your audience – quizzes get up to 217% more shares on social media, and all traffic comes back to your site!

Creating a popular online quiz – the secret recipe:

  • Sign up for your free 14 day trial of Riddle – no credit card required.
  • Select ‘quiz’ from our list of our quiz types.
  • Click ‘create’ or browse our templates and click ‘copy to account’ to move one to your account.
  • In the ‘Create’ step, choose your title and write a short description of what the quiz is about.
  • Pick a compelling main/title image – you can use our image options (Pexels, Google, Instagram), GIFs, videos or upload your own.

What questions work best in a popular online quiz?

Now – the best part… writing the questions!

  • Quizzes have answers with a clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer.
  • About 8-10 questions is the sweet spot – after that you’ll see a drop-off in completion rates.
  • Your questions (and answers) can be all text – or you add images.
  • (We recommend images – on average, people are 72.7% more likely to finish your quiz.)
  • Add answers – and put a green check mark by the correct one
  • Add a correct answer explanation… people don’t mind being wrong, but they love to know why.

For a popular online quiz – user result types are critical

Finishing a quiz – and merely finding out how many questions you get right is booooring!

Quizzes are viral because users learn something about themselves – and want to share with their friends.

Riddle lets you go beyond numbers – by adding a personal result type for each score. A funny (or even slightly snarky) description is far more likely to be shared.

Top tip: Don’t spend all your creativity on the questions. Spend at least as much time on each result type.

Imagine you created a cooking quiz – your answer types could be:

  • ‘You’re such a bad cook you could burn water!’
  • ‘You’re good at cooking but you tend to just cook what you know’
  • ‘You have flashes of brilliance in the kitchen’
  • ‘You are a true master chef!’

Add a few words describing their performance – or in this case skills (or lack) in the kitchen.

Remember that the idea is to ensure the user likes their result – and won’t be embarrassed to share with their friends.

It’s okay to be a little sassy on the lowest result – the user knows they’ve got to be pretty bad to get this result!

Add a quiz timer:

Using a quiz timer will add a whole new dynamic to your popular online quiz. Seeing that progress bar march down question by question gets the pulse pounding – and boosts completion rates. (It also prevents folks from turning to trusty Google to find the answers.)

  • Set a quiz time limit – give your users X seconds to finish your entire quiz.
  • Add question limits – you can also choose to set a timer for each question, such as ’10 seconds to answer each question’.
  • Individual quiz question times – want to get a little tricky? Start easy and go hard with different timers for each question. Question #1 might have 15 seconds, #2 13 seconds, and so on. Subtle yet effective way to ramp up the challenge.

With Riddle, you can quickly add your own timers – and mix/match these formats in a single quiz. Timers are also brilliant for running quiz contests – especially combined with a lead generation form.

Popular online quiz examples?

Sure – that makes sense, but let’s check out some great examples from our Riddle partners:

Looking for tips on creating one of the always popular personality tests? Check out our blog post chock full of ideas and best practices.

Have a question about writing quizzes that go viral? Let us know at hello@riddle.com – we read and respond to every message!