SmartSurvey Logo
Design & Manage
Send & Collect
Analyse Results
Account & Billing

Skip Logic

Skip Logic (sometimes referred to as 'branching' or ‘routing’) allows you to take your respondents down different paths, depending on the answer they give to a question.

For example, you might want to ask the respondent if they own a car. If they answer 'yes', you could ask what type of car. If they answer ‘no’, you could skip to the next set of questions.

Before you Start:

Some tips before you begin:

  • Create the question that will determine the path and add the pages to which you would like to direct your respondents.
  • It’s the question that determines the path and you direct your respondents to pages.
  • It may be easiest to work through your skip logic rules in order that your answer choices sit on the question where possible.
  • Naming your pages descriptively, according to the answer choice(s) each one is associated with, will make it easier to select the correct page when setting up your skip logic rules.
  • There is no one correct way to setup skip logic as it caters for extremely varied requirements. With understanding from the explanations below we hope to set you off with what you need to set up and test out your own skip logic requirements.

How to Add Skip Logic:

  1. On the ‘Design’ page of your survey, click the ‘Skip Logic’ button to the right of the question that determines the path.
  2. Click ‘Add New Rule’.
  3. Click on the ‘Condition’ drop down menu and select from the options. The condition is how you select the answer choices that you want to include or exclude from the rule that you are creating.
    • ‘Choice is’ - Allows one answer choice to be selected that will be included in the rule.
    • ‘Choice is one of the following’ - Allows multiple answer choices to be selected that will be included in the rule.
    • ‘Choice is not’ - Allows one answer choice to be selected that will be excluded from the rule.
    • ‘Choice is not one of the following’ - Allows multiple answer choices to be selected that will be excluded from the rule.
    • ‘Respondent Answers this question’ - The respondent gives an answer to this question. This will always be true if the question is set as Required / Mandatory, or is a slider-scale question.
    • ‘Respondent skips this question’ - The respondent does not answer this question, meaning they did not choose an option, or enter a value for a free-text question.
  4. Click the ‘Choice’ drop down menu and select the relevant answer choice(s) for your rule.
  5. Click the ‘Action’ drop down menu and select from the options:
    • ‘Jump to page’ - Refers to the page the respondents will land on next. This action allows multiple pages to be skipped but applies the rule immediately. For example: setting a rule on page 1 you could jump respondents to page 8, but you can’t say "after page 2, jump to page 8."
    • ‘Skip over page’ - Is referring to a page the respondents won’t land on. Only one page can be selected per rule. Any page following the page that holds the question determining the route can be selected, no matter how far along the survey this may be.
    • ‘Finish Survey’ - Sends your respondents to the finish page of the survey. They won't be asked any more questions and the response will be marked as complete as soon as they move past the current page.
    • ‘Disqualify Respondent’ - Sends your respondents to the ‘Disqualified Page’, the response will be marked as a completed response and also tagged as "disqualified".
  6. Click the ‘Page’ drop down menu and select the relevant page for your rule.
  7. If you have selected the ‘Action’ ‘Jump To Page’ you will also have a ‘Start at’ drop down menu allowing you to select the question position on that page that you would like to be displayed. If you choose an option to start at a specific numbered question, any earlier question on that page will be hidden and not displayed.
  8. Click ‘Save’.
  9. Now follow these steps again to add your next rule until you have catered for all routes that deviate from the default route.

Once you have set up some rules you can use the Survey Preview to test if it’s working as you need.

Editing Surveys With Skip Logic

If you need to edit or remove the Skip Logic rules on a question, this is done in the same way as the process for creating them described above.

Moving or Deleting Pages

The Survey Editor allows you to move or remove pages in the survey. If your survey has Skip Logic set up, then extra care needs to be taken when doing this.

  • If a page that is targeted by a Skip Logic "Jump To" rule is deleted, then the survey will no longer function correctly as the respondent will be directed to a non-existent page.
  • If a page that is targeted by a Skip Logic "Jump To" rule is moved to a point in the survey before the question that contains the rule, the survey will no longer function correctly, as the respondent will be directed "backwards" in the survey, which is not permitted.

Because of this, when you try and make such a change via the survey editor, you will be shown a warning alerting you to this, and you should review all the Skip Logic rules on your survey to ensure that they are still valid.

Further Reading

If you would like to see examples of skip logic on different question types or would like to add more complexities to your skip logic have a look at our other guides:

Was this guide helpful?

YES NO