Information is easily one of the most powerful commodities in the world and surveys are one of the better ways to acquire more information.

In today’s review, we actually take a look at two online services that approach the world of surveys, but from utterly different directions. Even so, the sites have been designed to work together for an even more impressive result.

Build Surveys With Survey Builder

The first of these online services is called Survey Builder and it is a free survey tool. In effect, you get a utility where you can build up a number of online surveys, gathering valuable data from users all around the Internet. And yes, it is completely free to use as you see fit.

After signing up for a free account, you can dive right into building your first survey. The most basic type would have a single-select list, as depicted above. This is where you ask a question and the visitor has the opportunity to select just one of the possible options via the available radio buttons. That’s straightforward enough.

However, you can easily ask all sorts of other questions too. You can build surveys with multi-select lists, drop-down menus, matrix-style questions, and more. Single-select and multi-select image options are in the works, which is great if you want respondents to react to two different product images, possible logos, or whatever else.

Free or Paid Responses

To test out the service, I built a quick single question survey (your surveys can include dozens of questions if you’d like) asking about the upcoming election in the US. I was then provided with two options: invite my own audience or access the on-demand audience.

With the former, I’m given a simple link to the survey that can then be freely shared via email, on a website, through social media, and so on. With the latter, I can pay to have people within a specific demographic take the survey. The “target audience” can be defined based on country, age, gender, education, household income, employment status, location, and so on. A single response to a standard survey of up to 10 questions costs 10 credits, which works out to $ 5. When you sign up. for an account, you are given 200 free credits to start.

Analyzing the Data

What’s great is that the analytical data is supplied to you in real time. This shows how many people started the survey, how many are currently taking the survey, how many completed it, how many were terminated, and how many didn’t finish. Of course, you get a breakdown of the responses too.

All of these responses can be freely downloaded as an unfiltered CSV file for offline viewing. When you have a lot of people responding to your survey, you can also filter the results so that you are only looking at one sub-group. The filters include traffic sources, questions, date range, and time in survey. When you have multiple questions, you can filter the data based only on people who answered a certain way in one or more of the questions.

Getting Paid to Take Surveys

So, you can offer a monetary incentive to people to fill out your survey, but where do you find these people? That’s the other half of the equation and it’s called Survey Head. This is where you can find paid online surveys to fill out.

After filling out some basic demographic information, you are presented with the dashboard where you find surveys matching your profile. The “reward” amount can vary, but I found that most surveys paid between $ 0.10 and $ 2.00. That’s not a heck of a lot of money, especially when each individual survey typically takes 15-20 minutes, depending on the number of questions.

The credit you earn isn’t really cash, in the strictest sense, either. Instead, it can be converted for a number of different “rewards” from the Survey Head catalog. These include gift cards to places like the NFL Shop and Tiger Direct.

Surveys for Fun and Profit

I understand what the developers were trying to achieve here. They have a complete ecosystem where people can build the surveys, as well as fill out surveys for money. The layout and user interface is easy to understand and the services seem to work without a hitch. For my part, there is more value in Survey Builder from a market research perspective, since the payouts from Survey Head aren’t really substantial enough to pique my interest.