Best Practices for Testing Surveys and Workflows in Qualtrics | XM Community
Question

Best Practices for Testing Surveys and Workflows in Qualtrics

  • 13 November 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 226 views

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

What are some best practices for testing surveys and workflows in Qualtrics? We build many surveys and dashboards, and need to test the connected workflows with real email adresses. We also use the Respondents Funnel in dashboards, and of course Qualtrics cannot discern between respondent and test.

Is it necessary/best to have a dedicated Testing Directory?

Does anyone has alternatives, e.g. an extra embedded data field to filter out test=1/0?


6 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +30

In my experience it’s not necessary to have a dedicated testing directory. However, I have found it helpful to use a burner gmail account for testing purposes rather than using emails from my organization, so you don’t accidentally set off any internal spam protection or cause Qualtrics to block you or your colleagues’ email addresses.

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

@MatthewM, but when you do that, the Directory/Respondents Funnel will count that testing email to your burner gmal account as an Email Sent. So when you visualize the total of Email Sent / invitations in your dashboard, the count will not be correct. Do you then filter on List ID or Distribution ID?

Userlevel 7
Badge +30

Sorry, I don’t have a suggestion. We don’t do that sort of visualization for our projects so that’s not a consideration.

Userlevel 7
Badge +61

@MatthewM, but when you do that, the Directory/Respondents Funnel will count that testing email to your burner gmal account as an Email Sent. So when you visualize the total of Email Sent / invitations in your dashboard, the count will not be correct. Do you then filter on List ID or Distribution ID?

Good afternoon from a dark and chilly Sweden!

Coming from someone who has never done the likes of what you’re describing I just wonder: Is there a way to label your test surveys with embedded data or a test-exclusive selection in the survey? That way you could see them in the report and/or have them deleted from the response data after testing is done. 

 

Just brainstorming here :)

 

All the best

-Mattias

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +31

@MatthewM, but when you do that, the Directory/Respondents Funnel will count that testing email to your burner gmal account as an Email Sent. So when you visualize the total of Email Sent / invitations in your dashboard, the count will not be correct. Do you then filter on List ID or Distribution ID?

Good afternoon from a dark and chilly Sweden!

Coming from someone who has never done the likes of what you’re describing I just wonder: Is there a way to label your test surveys with embedded data or a test-exclusive selection in the survey? That way you could see them in the report and/or have them deleted from the response data after testing is done. 

 

Just brainstorming here :)

 

All the best

-Mattias

 

Or delete your test sends from the Distribution tab?

Userlevel 2
Badge +4

Hi there,

In workflow testing:

  • in case you are testing multiple workflows at the same time, I would suggest to separate them while testing in order to not “waste” any email address.
    If you are testing both contact import and survey distribution, be sure the first one is ok before enabling the second one.
  • You can flag an options to consider both historical data upload and actual survey responses as survey responses that can trigger the workflow. Uploading historical data can be useful to generate a lot of responses avoiding annoying embedded data addiction to test response generation.

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