How To Reduce Ghost Completes And Improve Survey Responses

Here are some recommendations to avoid fraudulent responses and ghost completes.

• Share secure links: Ensure your links are secure to avoid fraudulent entry.
• Encrypt links: Link encryption provides confidentiality and integrity to the transmitted data. It also makes it nearly impossible to identify the parameters being passed, leading to links that are less easily manipulated.
• Work with a partner to ensure security: A technology partner can help facilitate the connections between buyers and suppliers. This enables both security and the ability to validate response data in real time.
• Confirmation of legitimate survey responses: Server-to-server callbacks enable the server hosting the survey to send a callback to a designated server or system responsible for recording and validating survey responses. This callback serves as a confirmation that a legitimate survey completion has occurred.

This form of fraudulent activity obfuscates the survey’s integrity, making it difficult for marketers to translate responses into measurable and meaningful insights.

As with other marketing initiatives, sometimes your first attempt to grab a potential customer’s attention doesn’t quite work. The same logic applies when soliciting survey feedback.

Content marketers cannot convey the true message behind the research and source tangible takeaways. This results in detrimental campaign outcomes such as the time spent planning, outlining, drafting, publishing, and promoting a research study.

How Survey Fraud Impacts Content Marketers

Aside from its impact on marketers, ghost completes can disrupt an entire ecosystem. Clients who expect to see valid responses are instead met with invalid completes.

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This content can lead to more traffic, leads, conversions, demos, and sales.

By implementing the strategies outlined in this blog post, content marketers and researchers can minimize ghost completes, enhance response quality, and ultimately obtain highly impactful data for informed decision-making.

In contrast, surveys with 15 questions and more have a completion rate of 41.94%.

Lack Of Incentive

As a result, ghost completes negatively impact data quality, undermine the survey’s validity, and lead to gaps in the dataset.

Content marketers rely on accurate, thoughtful survey responses to gather valuable insights about their target audience.

However, market research organizations can mitigate the potential of fraud, and ghost completes in particular. We’ll cover more strategies to reduce ghost completes next.

Strategies To Reduce Ghost Completes

Content will become more valuable, useful, and impactful, leading to more shares, higher search engine visibility, and better campaign outcomes.

As technology advances and becomes more sophisticated in the market research industry, so, too, does the likelihood of fraud.

While you’d expect your respondents to answer every question to the best of their ability, fraudulent responses are becoming more prevalent.

If a respondent doesn’t feel connected to the content and context of the survey, they are less likely to provide meaningful responses.

In this post, we’ll explore how ghost completes undermine the surveying process, factors that contribute to ghost completes, as well as strategies to reduce ghost completes to improve content quality.

The market research industry’s growing source of incomplete and inaccurate data stems from more than just the previously mentioned quality issues. Consider the following ways fraud differs from data quality.

Types Of Fraud

• Ghost completes.
• Repetitive responses.
• Systematic behavior.
• Similar IP address.
• Inputting the same response for open-ended questions.
• Using gibberish or a different language in open-ended questions.

Data Quality Issues

• Key smashing, or typing a random sequence of letters or numbers.
• Contradictory responses.
• Inappropriate responses (such as profanity).
• Unthoughtful or poor responses to open-ended questions.

Long, complex surveys lead to lower completion rates.

Provide clear instructions, a logical flow, and visually engaging elements to engage survey respondents.

Lack Of Personalization

In an era where quality content reigns supreme (and is more likely to make its way to the top of the search engine results pages), online studies and other research content types win when ghost completes aren’t haunting the results.

Consumers may feel less inclined to complete online surveys if there isn’t an incentive to do so.

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