Sitting down to write your quiz is a whole process. First, you have to gather the courage and conviction to start (which you’ve likely done if you’re reading this). Then you buckle up to learn the ins and outs of creating a quiz just right for your industry. In this article, I’m going to focus on a commonly asked question: Does my quiz need branching logic?
Don’t get me wrong: writing a lead generation quiz can be a ton of fun! What could be more gratifying than creating something to elevate your business, generate leads, and help you learn more about your audience?
The issue is figuring out the right way to build it out while not getting too stuck in the process.
Choosing the correct quiz logic is important because it ensures that you’re leading your audience to the right result in the right way at the right time.
And there’s more than one way to do that! Let’s dive into what branching logic is (and what it isn’t) and consider whether this (or more traditional logic) is the right move for your quiz.
- Strategizing your quiz
- What is branching logic?
- Why choose branching logic?
- Using branching logic in the Interact builder
- Hot tips
Strategizing your quiz
Before you decide what type of logic is best for your quiz, get clear on your why. The process will feel much smoother, and you’ll be more equipped to create a strategy that supports your overall goal.
When thinking about your big “why,” consider questions that support your business goals for building a quiz. Questions like:
- Am I trying to focus solely on list building?
- Am I looking to make a specific product recommendation and boost overall sales?
- Do I want to gather information from my audience to understand them better?
- Am I looking to create brand awareness and connect to my audience in a new way?
- What do I want my audience to know about themselves by the end of the quiz?
Your business goals drive direction; knowing what they are will help you seamlessly design your quiz to best suit your overall intention. Once you’ve got that dialed in, you can better understand how to build your quiz with the right logic to support it.
What is branching logic?
What the heck is branching logic anyway?! The world of quizzes can feel full of lingo and unfamiliar territory, and it can be easy to get stuck in a web of overthinking.
First, I’ll cover what branching logic is not. Branching logic (otherwise known as conditional logic) is not the only way to get quiz-takers their desired result. There are other ways to lead your audience to the right place!
As mentioned in the above video, you can use a personality, scored, or assessment quiz with correlating results to get your quiz-taker to the right place.
With a personality quiz, simply toggle to “edit result correlations” to match your answers with the right result.
With a scored quiz, select “Set answer scores” to assign a specific weight to your quiz answers. Scored quizzes are great for assessing quiz-taker knowledge or learning where they are in a process.
For an assessment quiz, since you’ll primarily be gathering information on someone’s knowledge of a topic, each answer will be either true or false.
Check out our blog post on choosing the right quiz logic to learn more about the best path forward for your quiz.
Now, back to branching logic! Branching logic is a way to personalize the quiz experience for each quiz-taker.
When creating a quiz with branching logic, you’re creating “branches” that lead the customer to the next best question to suit them. So, each question a quiz-taker receives will depend on how they answered the previous question.
Make sense so far?
Let’s consider a car salesman’s quiz, for example. The first question in this car salesman’s quiz could be, Do you drive? If the quiz-taker answers No, the car salesman would change the direction of the quiz, perhaps asking, Are you interested in a car for someone else? Or he could send them straight to a result because if they don’t drive, there may not be much point in sending them through a whole series of questions.
If the person answers Yes, however, the car salesman could direct them to a question to build on this. He might ask about the quiz-taker’s driving style or preferences and then recommend a car based on how they answer.
Getting clearer? Let’s keep going!
Branching logic allows you to segment your leads based on how quiz-takers respond to your questions. Think of branching logic like a choose-your-own-adventure style quiz, where there are multiple paths the quiz-taker can take to get to the right result.
Setting up questions with branching logic in the Interact builder could look like this:
- Questions 1, 2, and 3 are for information gathering. Quiz-takers will have to answer these first questions to keep going.
- Question 4 asks a conditional question that determines the next step on the quiz path. Answer “A” may take them to a quiz result, while answer “B” may take them to another branch of questions.
- The branches continue until all paths correlate to the best result.
Why use branching logic over traditional logic?
Now that you’re clear on what branching logic is (and is not), it’s time to decide if it’s the best logic for your quiz.
Conditional logic leads your quiz-taker down a variety of paths to the best result. While you can absolutely get your quiz-taker to a perfect result by setting correlations, there are a few examples where you would still be better off using branching logic.
Asking follow-up questions
Branching logic creates a choose-your-own-adventure type of journey. If you want to lead quiz-takers to specific outcomes, you can ask different sets of follow-up questions based on how quiz-takers responded to previous questions. This is a great option to meet your customers where they’re at while offering a personalized journey that will also help you segment your audience.
Having multiple quizzes within one quiz
Sometimes your big quiz idea requires that you have more quizzes existing within the same quiz. Sounds complicated? Let’s break it down!
Let’s say you’re working in the restaurant industry and trying to discover the best working hacks for each role. Because each persona is so different, you may have to dig deeper into each one to get your quiz-taker to the right place. For example, if someone answers that they are a cook, you can redirect them to a set of correlating questions different than the set of questions given to the bartender.
The primary draw here is that you can further segment your audience to better personalize your offers and services — sending the right message to the right people at the right time.
Product recommendations
Branching logic is also great for product recommendations. Let’s say you have an e-commerce business where you sell vacuum cleaners. Each vacuum cleaner has its own features that correspond to potential customers’ unique needs, and your breadth of product is high. You could use branching logic to better match quiz-takers with the perfect vacuum cleaner. For example, asking, Do you have pets?, would lead a customer to a vacuum specifically for pet hair rather than one for hardwood floors.
The bottom line is to match customers with the best possible option.
Using branching logic in the builder
Now that you’re clear on what branching logic is and why you would use it, let’s look at how it all happens inside the builder!
Step 1 — Turn on “Branching logic”
Once you enter your results and questions into the builder, click the “Questions” tab and toggle on the branching logic feature. Once you turn it on, you’ll be redirected to a blank map where you’ll build the different question paths.
Step 2 — Start building your maps!
Drag your questions over to the map and build your branches accordingly. Remember that everyone will take the first question, so the branching should start after that. From there, create links to your follow-up questions or link to specific results.
Step 3 — Test it out!
Once you have all your logic mapped out, try it on a beta group to see if it makes sense. There can be many iterations of branching logic quizzes, and the best way to know if it’s right for you is to try it out and see how it’s landing!
I recommend leaning on the Quiz Collective — a free-for-members online community where you can share your quiz to get feedback on how you can better optimize and refine.
And if you need extra help getting started, check out our step-by-step guide on making conditional logic quizzes.
Hot tips
There you have it! Remember: there are many different ways you can customize your quiz. Don’t hesitate to experiment! Try a few different strategies and find out what works best.
Below are some hot tips to keep handy when creating any quiz:
- Keep it simple. It’s easy to overthink the process and end up in a state of inertia. When writing your quiz, consider the simplest approach for getting your information across.
- Done is better than perfect! Your quiz will change and evolve with you and your business. Try not to get too attached to it being perfect. Instead, focus on getting it done so you can refine and optimize as you go.
- Get clear on your results! Getting super duper clear on your results will help your questions flow effortlessly. Consider writing a rough draft that includes all the differentiators for each result category. Then write your questions and see if branching logic will improve the quiz.
Let us know how it goes!