Quiz maker analytics – Riddle’s ‘Analyze’ module
(Update – June 2021) We’re super excited to announce the launch of our newest quiz maker analytics module.
Our old system was built in 2014 when we launched – and groaning under the load of our fast-growing community, especially with global publishers like Red Bull, the NFL, and CNN. Their accounts each get millions and millions of quiz takers every month – and that adds up to a huge amount of data.
Our newest system can handle even the biggest data requests in just a second or two – in this screenshot, covering 181,000,000 quiz views and 76,000,000 quiz takers – it took 1.3 seconds. Amazing.
- Get a funnel perspective – from how many saw the main image (views), clicked on the start button (starts) and finished the Riddle (finishes). Finally, measure how socially viral your Riddle is with the (shares).
- Optimise your quizzes – See a big drop from ‘Starts’ to ‘Finishes’? You can improve your Riddle quiz to keep users engaged. No need to re-embed; your online quiz updates automatically.
- Gather interesting data – and share with your audience in follow up articles (ex. “Did you know 68% of you think cats are better than dogs?”)
Riddle quiz analytics 2.0
Hi all – we just rolled out our biggest improvement to our quiz analytics module, with loads of new data points, such as:
- Call to action button clicks
- Skipping lead form
- Sharing by social network
- And many more
Plus – you can now view/compare your quiz stats on a daily basis (and download as a CSV file – Pro/Team plans).
You can also compare date ranges – so you can see how your quiz has done one week or the next. Another great use case – you can optimize your quiz and track if your changes have made an improvement (compare ‘before’ and ‘after’ date ranges).
Team-wide or account-level quiz statistics
You can also view statistcs across your entire account – using our ‘statistics’ module:
Quiz maker analytics – a deeper look into the stats of a quiz
Right – so let’s go into more detail about reading the stats from a quiz with our quiz maker analytics.
For all of you data nerds out there, Riddle starts with a broad overview of the key statistics and then lets you dive into the individual answers to get a detailed picture of how readers interacted with your Riddle.
And along the way, I’ll also give you some good quiz maker analytics benchmark numbers so you see how just how well your Riddle is performing.
Quiz maker analytics – the overview
To access your stats, click on the “Analyze” step when editing your quiz.
We present the key stats which show you how your Riddle is performing at a glance.
Mouse over the little ‘i’ icon for a little help text to remind you what these numbers mean.
Quiz maker analytics – views
Shows how many people have seen your Riddle quiz. We count a view whenever someone visits your website or blog page where the Riddle is embedded or whenever someone lands directly on this Riddle on Riddle.com.
Before sharing your Riddle on social media, we always recommend that you embed your Riddle into your own site. This guarantees that all social traffic comes back to your site and not to Riddle.
If you only share the Riddle.com link to your quiz (www.riddle.com/a/#####), Facebook and the other social media platforms won’t know to forward people to your site and they’ll land on Riddle.com.
For max exposure, our viral wizards recommend embedding each Riddle in the side bar of your blog.
Comparing Google Analytics and Riddle’s view statistics:
One question we often receive – “My Google Analytics page views number varies considerably from the number of views on Riddle. Why aren’t they the same?”
Riddle and Google count views very differently.
- Riddle’s quiz creator counts a view every time a quiz is loaded, even if it is loaded in the non-visible part of the site (below the fold for example).
- Riddle also counts a view even if it is viewed by the same user.
- So the same user loading a quiz 10X on a page would count as 10 views.
- Google Analytics on the other hand counts views only by unique users during a certain time. They also have other technical requirements for counting views – but we’ll hold off covering that here.
Quiz starts
Most Riddle quiz types have a “start” button (except for polls, which immediately ask you a question). “Starts” count either how many people clicked on the start button or voted in a poll.
To improve the ratio of people starting your Riddle, the most important thing is (just like retail) location, location, location. Embed your quiz or poll just after the first paragraph of your blog post or article – this will give you a massive improvement on your number of starts.
The other big tip? Create an attention-grabbing quiz title and pick the most compelling main quiz image you can. You might have the best quiz in the world, but if you can’t persuade people to click ‘start’ – all of your creative genius will be wasted.
We don’t have the space to go into great detail here – but if you want to excel at converting viewers to quiz takers, download our free e-book ‘QuizMaster: Growth hack your marketing through quizzes and personality tests‘.
Want to totally geek out? Use a title generator from Hubspot. (Actually – you totally need to try this one… even if it is just for a chuckle. For this post, they suggested ‘7 Things About Quiz Maker Analytics Your Boss Wants To Know’.)
‘Play again’ button – and starts vs. views
You might notice some of your quizzes where the ‘starts’ total is higher than ‘views’.
That seems a bit counter-intuitive, since views should be larger that starts – as not every page visitor will click start.
However, you might see this if your quiz is particularly difficult – which will causes users to click ‘play again’ to improve their score.
In this rare case, starts would increase by one – with views remaining unaffected.
Quiz completions
We count a ‘finish’ if someone reaches either the result screen of your quiz or personality test, or gets to the last item of your list. (Polls are a little different – everyone is sent to the poll results automatically after voting so the number of finishes and starts should be pretty equal.)
Oh, one other tip – using our lead gen form to collect user info before showing their results is a powerful tool to get more customers or newsletter subscribers. However, just keep in mind that a small % of people will move on to other websites instead of filling out the form or clicking on “no thanks” to get the results.
Benchmarks: a finish rate of 70% is a good goal. So, for every 10 people who start your Riddle, you’ll need 7 finishes.
If you’re below the average finish rate of 70% across all content on Riddle, here are some suggestions:
- Look at the detailed quiz maker analytics for the individual questions or list items. Do you see a huge drop off at one particular item? Maybe that question is too hard or the list item drives people away because it is disgusting, scary or plain boring? Change that one item and monitor the effect.
- Do you have more than 10 questions in a quiz, more than 15 questions in a personality test or more than 10 list items? Consider shortening your Riddle.
- We’re big fans of the ‘Three Minute Rule’ – anything longer and you’ll lose people especially on smartphones. There are some rare examples of quizzes with 99 questions or 100 item lists doing really well, but these rare examples are .. well .. really rare.
- If you changed all that and still cannot get even remotely close to a 70% finish rate, contact us by sending a note to hello@www.riddle.com/blog. Include a link to your Riddle or to the page where you embedded it, and we’ll be happy to have our in-house writers and psychologists have a look. (We might struggle with some languages if your Riddle is not in English, but we will give it our best shot to make sense of what you wrote.
Social shares
Our quiz maker analytics shows in the ‘sharing’ section how many people have shared your Riddle via social media (Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.).
This is the holy grail for many businesses – the more shares you get, the more free traffic is sent back to your site… sometimes in the millions or ten of millions of views.
There are a few key factors influencing the share percentage:
- 3-5% is a good target to aim for with viral social sharing.
- (Please note: we can only track shares in our quiz maker analytics using the sharing buttons in each Riddle. If you’ve disabled the sharing overlay, the share count won’t be very useful.)
- Personality tests almost always get the highest number of shares, especially if they cover a widely popular topic like “Which Beatle Are You?” or any other highly engaging topic for your audience.
- Quizzes get shared if they are really challenging and the results are written in a funny way. Also, don’t be afraid to encourage sharing by asking the quiz taker in the result text to share the results to challenge all their friends.
- Lists most often get shared if they provide either very funny or very helpful content. Be original, be daring, and get shared.
Whew – almost finished!
To get someone to share your Riddle, it needs to be either very funny or make the sharer look (or feel) good.
Think about it – when you share things with friends in the ‘real’ world, you tell your friends funny stories, hot tips about that new restaurant you discovered, a great recipe you tried out or who your best friend is dating this week.
Why? You choose to share all these things because they are either newsworthy, they make you look informed, or sharing provides a real value to friends.
(Ahem, and on that note, sharing that you reached level 247 in Candy Crush might make you look good, but probably only in your own world – your friends care rather less about that.)
To learn more about what gets shared and how you can get people to share your content, we’re big fans of “Contagious – Why things catch on” by Jonah Berger.
Time on site
Quizzes are brilliant at in-depth engagement with your audience. Think about it – with 6-10 questions, visitors will spend an average of 3 minutes 34 seconds answering a typical quiz or personality test. That’s 56% better than the internet average of 2 minutes 17 seconds.
But wait – why is time on site important? It’s a valuable metric for several reasons:
SEO: There’s growing evidence that Google and other search engines reward sites that have high time on site. After all, search engines want to show the most useful, valuable content – if your site does better than most at keeping visitors engaged, you’ll rank higher – and get more free, organic search traffic.
Internal stakeholders: Time on site goes beyond the outdated metric of merely tracking page views as a sign of a healthy content marketing strategy. Content that engages and keeps visitors interested is great for your site and your brand.
Sponsored content: Are you running sponsored quizzes – like this one from sports publisher 90min around the film Tomb Raider? Your ad sales teams will love to show their clients how long quiz takers were surrounded by their brand and messaging.
Quiz leads
Last, if you’ve included a lead generation form in your quiz, the ‘Leads’ stat in our quiz maker analytics tracks how many people have filled in your form.
What’s a good quiz lead generation completion rate? That’s a little tricky – since there are many variables at play:
The ‘Call to action’ – why should the user give their details?
For example, just showing ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ is pretty weak – people might not see the value there.
- But something like ‘Get a free 15 minute Skype consultation’ or ‘Enter to win two free tickets’ is much stronger.
- Typical lead form opt-in rates average around 9-10%
- Quizzes blow that out of the water – our partners average 35%-45% especially around quiz contests.
- Our record? Executive coaching guru Merilyn of LeadYourWorld gets a phenomenal 68% opt-in rate, using her highly optimized personality test to power her marketing funnel
How to get more quiz leads?
- Provide value: Why should people give up their email address? You need to make it worth their while. It doesn’t have to be a prize – services or information that solve a problem work well. Providing more in-depth quiz results is a natural fit.
- Make your form mandatory: Our lead forms include a ‘skip’ option by default, so you don’t force people to complete the form to see their results. But that’s always an option.
- Lead quality will suffer – as people put in ‘donald@donaldtheduck.com’ or other bogus emails just to get to their results.
- Delay quiz answers: We recommend testing this out. For pop quizzes, instead of instantly showing ‘correct/wrong’ results for each question, you can delay the answers until after your lead form. People have more incentive to complete your form – boosting conversions.
How to best use our quiz maker analytics
Now that you’ve made your Riddle and see the statistics that show (hopefully) thousands of people enjoying your creativity, what do you do with it?
You should take a look at our drag and drop lead generation form builder, which we offer to all Riddle creators. Perfect for asking for users’ names, emails, and other info, you can use this to have them sign up for your newsletter or ask for more information about your site or services.
(Don’t have a newsletter? Start now – email marketing is still massively effective.)
But here are a few other ideas how to best use your quiz maker analytics:
- Write a follow up blog post sharing the results with your readers – We’re all suckers for an interesting fact – so pick out some intriguing stat like “Did you know that 73% of people couldn’t spell marshmallow?”
- Create a list on Riddle showing the highlights from your quiz – such as “3 Common Words Most People Have No Idea How to Spell”. Then of course embed that list into your follow up blog post.
- Send out a quiz summary to everyone who signed up – you can do this via our nifty lead capture form and send out automatically via MailChimp or using our Zapier app. We all like to measure ourselves against everyone else – so a detailed breakdown of how the 1,000 other people answered could be super interesting.
Thanks so much for reading – and hope you found this article helpful.
Finally, any random questions or comments – please let us know at hello@www.riddle.com/blog. We read and respond to every message! 🙂
