Create a survey

When Google Surveys collects responses from the “general-Internet audience,” it uses published Internet-population data sets for the target-population distribution. For example, when targeting United States, the United States government’s Current Population Survey (CPS) Internet Supplement is the target population distribution. For details, see our methodology overview. Note that our audience incomes are the median income of the areas we surveyed.

You can target questions based on inferred demographics (age, gender, or geography) from the first step of the survey-creation wizard.

For custom audiences such as dog owners or people who play golf, you can use screening questions that let you screen respondents to ensure that they are in your target audience. A screening question can be any non-binary, multiple choice question such as Yes / No / I plan to. As an example, respondents first see your screening question and then those who select “Yes” or “I plan to” answer the following questions from your survey.

Creating surveys in different languages

When targeting surveys to the general population in specific countries, you are required to write your survey questions in the language that’s available in the country you selected. Learn more about the language availability for each country.

Survey translation

Google Surveys does not provide any survey-translation services. All surveys must be written and submitted in the language that the survey is targeting. Surveys are not automatically translated.

Questions appear throughout sites in our publisher network in order to get a representative sample of respondents. Users complete survey questions in order to access high quality content around the web, and publishers get paid as their users answer. Google and many publishers want to protect their readers’ privacy and ensure that any proprietary data they have about their readership is not exposed, so we do not supply a list of the sites where individual questions run.

Google Surveys does not support matrix questions, or grids with response categories along the top and a list of questions down the side, which often prompt participants to abandon surveys (Brecko, Carstens; 2006). Instead, we suggest that you break out each row of a matrix question into its own separate multiple choice or rating question. This way, respondents can focus on each question and provide more accurate answers.

Learn more about our available question types