Empty Partial Responses Being Counted as Billable Responses | Experience Community
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Empty Partial Responses Being Counted as Billable Responses

  • June 9, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 2 views
I

I'm looking for some advice regarding incomplete responses in a survey.
We have several branch logic paths that display different questions based on embedded data values. The survey is configured to save incomplete responses after one week.
We've noticed that Qualtrics is recording a number of responses with low progress percentages (e.g., 5%, 10%, 20%), even though these responses contain no actual answers or meaningful respondent data. It seems that respondents may have entered the survey, triggered some logic, and then exited without answering any questions.
The main concern is that these records are being counted as billable responses, despite being essentially empty.
Has anyone encountered this behavior before? Is there a recommended way to prevent these empty partial responses from being saved or counted? Are there any best practices for filtering them out when branch logic and embedded data are involved?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

    1 reply

    C
    Level 5 ●●●●●
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    You can change the setting to delete instead of record.

     

    You can try to have questions on the first page with force validation with some validation to reduce bypass.

    However, there will still exist some scenarios where individuals will just enter some gibberish to proceed through if they know of the validation rules.

     

    You can filter the column “Finished” to true to show all complete response, however, depending on your survey set-up, there may be times where respondent may work on the survey until the last submit button, which may be considered as complete to some but not treated as complete due to the setting.

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