What Is Google Forms (Google Surveys)?

Google Forms is Google's free survey creation and form-building application. The often-confused Google Surveys was a separate paid survey product that was shut down in 2022; the tool that lives on today is Google Forms. With this application, you can build fully personalized surveys and send them to users or business partners to collect useful feedback.

What does Google Forms do?

With Google Forms, you can create surveys designed to gather exactly the information you need from users or business partners. Once you share these surveys, you can learn about your target audience and their preferences, then collect and analyze the data to draw a roadmap for your company.

Google Forms is also a popular and efficient tool beyond internal use: many companies rely on it in job postings to get to know applicants.

How do you create a Google Form?

Building customized surveys in Google Forms is straightforward.

Signing in to Gmail and opening Forms:

To get started, first sign in with your personal or company Gmail account. After logging in, go to the Google homepage, click the "more" area shown in the image below, and select "Forms" to reach the platform's interface:

You can do the same thing by signing in to your Google Drive account and following the steps "New, More, Google Forms".

Creating the survey:

In the next step, open a blank form page and start building your survey.

Fill in your survey title, your questions, the answer options, and settings such as the response type, and your survey comes together quickly and easily.

Response types include multiple choice, dropdown menus, checkboxes, and several other options. You can also attach images to answer choices.

If you want to move the work forward with more than one person, use the "More" button and choose the "Add collaborators" option.

Customizing your Google Form:

Once the questions are ready, you can shape how your survey looks. The "Customize theme" option lets you change the background color, theme color, and font style, and add images.

You can also enrich your form with Google Forms add-ons through the "Add-ons" option. When your draft is ready, use the "Preview" option in the top right to see how the survey looks and make any changes it still needs.

Survey settings:

You can manage how response data is handled (collecting email addresses, adding a progress bar, assigning point values to questions, and so on) from the settings section:

Sharing your Google Form:

After all these steps, finish your form and deliver it to your chosen audience so they can answer and complete it. With the "Send" option, you can publish your form by email, with a URL link, with an embed code, or through social media.

Analyzing survey results:

You can easily analyze the answers you receive from your target users under the "Responses" tab.

How should you use Google Forms?

Paying attention to a few tips while creating Google surveys matters a great deal for your company's image and memorability. It also improves how much value your surveys deliver. Here are some tips we can recommend:

Build brand awareness with your users

Even though the main goal of a survey is to analyze responses and set a course accordingly, it is important to remember that, like every material you put in front of customers or business partners, your forms represent your business. Branding matters even in a simple form.

There is a practical way to brand your forms. Make sure to add your company logo prominently to your surveys and pick a background color that reflects your brand identity.

Good design does more than create a better first impression; it also keeps your survey participants more engaged.

Ask open-ended questions

When running a survey, there is a delicate balance between closed-ended questions (yes/no) and open-ended ones. Yes/no questions are easier and more convenient for respondents, but they yield far less detail. If you need a substantive answer to inform business decisions, such as learning about customers' experiences on your website, open-ended questions are the safer route.