How do you handle completion rate metrics when incomplete responses are deleted or recorded? | Experience Community
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How do you handle completion rate metrics when incomplete responses are deleted or recorded?

  • February 11, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 32 views
gPandey_715
Level 4 ●●●●
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Hi everyone,

I’m looking for best practices around reporting completion metrics using the Response Funnel.

In our project, we track completion rate using a custom metric:
Completion rate = Finished responses / Started responses

We’ve realised that after a certain period, incomplete responses are either deleted or recorded as part of our data hygiene process. Since the Response Funnel reflects the current state of responses, this seems like it would reduce the “Started” count over time and potentially inflate the completion rate historically.

This raises a few questions for us:

  • Does deleting or recording incomplete responses retroactively change the Response Funnel counts used in dashboards?

  • How do teams typically avoid completion rates becoming artificially high over time because of this cleanup?

  • Do you use snapshots, time-bound calculations, or another approach to keep completion metrics historically accurate?

Would love to hear how others handle this in ongoing/continuous data collection projects.

Thanks in advance!

GAP

1 reply

Lpena
Qualtrics Employee
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  • Lpena
  • Qualtrics Employee
  • February 19, 2026

Hi, gPandey_715

It’s worth noting that deleting or recording incomplete responses won't retroactively change the counts in your Response Funnel dashboards. Once that data is pulled in, it stays as is, even if you clean up the underlying contacts later. Since the funnel holds onto historical event data for at least 13 months, deleting those incomplete responses can actually end up inflating your historical completion rates. 📊

To keep things accurate, most teams tend to use snapshots to freeze counts at a specific time or use time-bound calculations to filter by distribution dates. You can also try creating custom metrics for your Response and Completion rates to strictly control which records are counted in the numerator and denominator. 📈 If you're seeing some behavior that doesn't seem right or if your metrics aren't aligning as expected, it might be a good idea to have our experts take a look. You can get in touch with the team by logging into the Customer Success Hub at https://support-portal.qualtrics.com/ and selecting the technical support tile to open a case.

This reply contains AI usage for clarity and language purposes.
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