Google Forms is a free tool from Google that allows you to build surveys, quizzes, or feedback forms easily. It allows you to fill your forms to the brim with various question types, customize them with themes and branding, share them with respondents via email or links, collect responses, and analyze the data.
Overall, Google Forms provides email marketers with a versatile and powerful tool for gathering information:
Since way fancier and feature-rich survey builders like Typeform exist, why use Google Forms? While it has some drawbacks, here are some brownie points to consider:
Have we convinced you to create your first survey on Google Forms? If so, follow our step-by-step tutorial and build a perfect form with us.
Since Google Forms is a tool developed by Google, you need an account on Google to get started. You can either create a personal account or a business account.
Here’s a tip: you don’t need a Google email address to set up an account. You can register your account with a non-Gmail address as well.
Now that you have your Google account, you’re ready to build your first survey. Thankfully, it’s very straightforward. Start by going to Google Forms, where you’ll see Google’s library of pre-made templates, and an option to create your own.
Click on Blank form, name your form, and write a short description.
Now it’s time to add a few questions to your form. Let’s imagine you’re in charge of marketing for a womenswear brand.
Questions can be compulsory or optional for your recipients to answer. To add a new question, click on the (+) icon.
As you can see, there are several types of questions you can add. We’ll briefly go through each of them now.
Use short-answer type questions to ask your recipients to provide info that comes in small bits of text, such as their name, their age, or their email address. Despite the prompt, the recipients can enter as much text as they want.
Paragraph questions are also text-based but presuppose a longer answer. This type of question is perfect when you want a detailed response or feedback.
Multiple choice questions have several options but the audience can only choose one. In addition to this, respondents can jump to another section of the form depending on their answers — more on that later!
Much like multiple choice, checkbox questions have several response options. The main difference is that it’s possible to select several answers at the same time. They also don’t allow the audience to jump to certain form sections based on the answers.
A drop-down question is similar to multiple choice in that it also offers several options where recipients can only select one response. The only difference is visual — the options are presented as a drop-down menu which saves space and looks neater in longer surveys. You can also drag and drop the options to reorder them.
This is what a drop-down question will look like to the recipients of your survey:
Prompt your audience to upload a relevant file with a file-upload type question. The files will be saved to your Google Drive. If you decide to include this type of question, make sure you only share your form with people you trust.
With this type of question, your audience can pick a number from a range. You can start the scale at 0 or 1 and go up to anywhere between 2 and 10. You can also add labels for the lowest and highest choices.
This is what a linear-scale question looks like to respondents:
Grid-type questions are easy to build and hard to describe — think of them like a matrix, or a table. Your questions are the rows of the table, and the answers are the columns. Since it’s a multiple-choice question, the recipients will only be able to place one response per row.
This is what this question will look like to the recipients of your survey:
The principle of a tick box grid-type question is similar to that of a multiple-choice grid. The difference is that several answers may be selected.
Your audience will see a checkbox grid like this. I selected a few answers just to demonstrate how it works:
If you need to ask your audience for a particular date in calendar format, this is where date-type questions come in. It’s important to remember that date formats vary around the world (for instance, DD/MM/YYYY in the UK, and MM/DD/YYYY in the USA). Unless your customers are logged in to their Google accounts, their date format will be the same as yours.
For example, this type of question may be useful if you want to ask customers about their birthdays and send birthday emails later.
This type of question prompts users to input a time. Here’s an example:
Some forms only have a handful of questions, while others are much more detailed. To avoid overwhelming your respondents, consider using sections. Sections are useful for splitting your form into parts, allowing respondents to answer one group of questions at a time.
To add a new section to your form, choose Add section.
Each section has a name and description.
But splitting longer surveys into parts is not the only use case for sections — you can also use them for conditional logic. Conditional logic questions adapt to respondents’ previous answers. So, instead of presenting every question to every respondent, your survey will show different questions to different respondents based on specific conditions. Here’s an example.
Let’s say, a respondent selects “Extremely unlikely” in a multiple-choice question about shopping at your store in the future. You want to find out why your customer is not happy about their shopping experience. So, you redirect them to a follow-up section that asks for more details. However, if your respondents select “Likely,” they won’t see the follow-up questions.
Here’s how to do it:
We have to confess — despite all of Google Forms’ advantages, it does have a drawback. It’s not the most customizable form builder out there — for example, you can’t customize the width and height of your survey. However, there are a few things you can switch up to make your survey match your company branding.
Click on the palette icon in the right-hand corner of your screen.
You can customize color schemes, fonts, and background color themes, as well as select a header image, in the Themes menu.
In this section, we’ll teach you how to invite collaborators, share your form online, and save it as a PDF.
Easy collaboration is a huge advantage of Google Workspace. Here’s how you can invite other Google users to contribute to your survey.
Click on the three dots icon in the right-hand corner of your screen, and select Add collaborators.
You can add editors in a similar way you grant access to Google Docs. The options include specific email addresses, everyone in your organization, or everyone with a link.
Before sharing your survey with the world, don’t forget to check your form settings. This is where to find the settings menu:
Responses settings help you control how responses are gathered and shared. You can restrict users to submitting just one form, permit them to change their answers, or get a copy of their responses. You can also decide whether to collect email addresses and share the form within your organization only or publicly with anyone who has the link.
In the Presentation section, you can control what your form looks like. For example, you can display a bar to show progress, mix up the order of questions, or show a link for submitting one more response from the same user.
There’s also a feature that allows you to turn your form into a quiz. It means that there will be point values assigned to questions and automated feedback to responders.
So, you have finished crafting your form, your collaborators are happy, and your settings are in order — time to send it out to your customers.
Click the Send button in the right-hand corner.
You’ll be presented with all the ways you can share your form.
You can send your form as an email directly to your audience, copy a link you can share on social media or any other platforms, or embed it as HTML. You can also add an editor to your form at this stage.
Please note that there’s also an option to collect email addresses from the respondents. New to email collection? Here’s our quick guide on how to collect email addresses for your marketing campaign.
With Google Forms, you can also share a pre-filled form — this means distributing a survey that’s already been partially filled out. For example, you can pre-populate some sections of your form with information like names or email addresses, to make it quicker for the respondents to fill out.
To get a URL for a pre-filled form, click on the three dots icon in the right-hand corner, followed by Get pre-filled link.
Pre-fill your survey, and share it with your respondents by clicking on the Get link button at the bottom of your form.
The only drawback of this feature is that Google Forms doesn’t save pre-filled links for future use — this means that you’ll need to redo this process each time you want to share a pre-filled form.
All of the sharing features we’ve discussed so far pertain to sending the form online — be it via email or links. Google also allows you to share your form the old-school way — on paper.
Start by clicking on the three buttons in the right-hand corner, then select Print.
Here, you’ll be able to either print your form or save it as a PDF.
In the version for printing, grids and multiple choice questions use pill buttons and boxes for responses, while text, date, and time fields have blank lines.
Once a few people have interacted with your questionnaire, you’ll be able to access their answers in the Responses section.
You’ll see a question-by-question breakdown, with different types of graphs.
One of Google Forms’ pros is its deep integration with other Google tools — take advantage of this by viewing the responses to your form in a spreadsheet via Google Sheets.
You can import your data into a new or existing spreadsheet. This is what our responses look like in the form of a spreadsheet:
This feature is especially handy for those who want to use conditional formatting features in Google Sheets.
Google Forms’ list of features is pretty comprehensive, but it’s not all-encompassing. If you find yourself needing more tools for your survey, add-ons can be the answer.
Add-ons for Google Forms are additional tools you can install to boost the functionality of your forms. With add-ons, you can do things like customize email notifications, collect digital signatures, and more. Add-ons for Google Forms are created by third-party developers as well as Google itself. Some are free, while you have to pay for others.
To access the library of add-ons, click on the three dots button, then select Get add-ons.
Here are some of the most popular add-ons right now:
Some add-ons allow you to partially automate your Google Forms experience. For example, there’s an add-on that will automatically add the “Other” option to your multiple-choice questions. Others will delete duplicate responses, or automatically generate custom documents based on the answers you get.
We recommend the following add-ons to marketing professionals:
Here are some handy tips and tricks you can use when creating and sending a Google Forms survey.
And there you have it! You’re now a pro at using Google Forms to create surveys, quizzes, and feedback forms.
So, to summarize,
