“How did you hear about us?”: choosing options that give usable answers

Most of the value of this question comes from the answer options. With the wrong options you get “Google”, “online” and “social media”, and you can’t act on any of them.

Ask “How did you hear about us?” with a list of options

An open text box gets you “insta”, “IG”, “instagram ad” and “saw u on the gram”, and someone has to clean that up before it means anything. A short list of options is faster for buyers and gives you numbers you can compare. Add Other with a text box at the end, for everything you didn’t think of.

Pick five to eight options

With fewer than five, many answers end up in “Other”. With more than eight, people stop reading and pick the first option that roughly fits. This list is a good starting point for most Shopify stores:

• Instagram
• TikTok
• Google search
• Friend or family
• Podcast
• I’ve bought from you before
• Other (with a text box)

Then change it to match where you spend time and money:

• Use the names customers remember. A buyer remembers “Instagram” or “a YouTube video”. Nobody remembers an Advantage+ campaign or a pre-roll ad.
• Keep together what buyers can’t tell apart. Few people know whether they clicked a Google ad or a normal search result. Ask “Google search” and let your ad account split it.
• Split what you pay for separately. If you sponsor podcasts and also run Spotify ads, one “Podcast” option hides which of the two works.
• Name the platforms. An option called “Social media” collects a large share of answers and tells you nothing about where to post.
• Add creators if you work with them. An option such as “A creator or influencer” separates paid partnerships from your own posts.
• Add places for offline stores. If you sell at markets, fairs or pop-ups, give them an option.

The “I’ve bought from you before” option matters more than it looks. Returning customers often can’t remember how they first found you, and without this option they pick something at random. With it, they leave the other options to new customers, so those numbers describe your actual acquisition.

Shuffle the order

Buyers who aren’t sure tend to pick an option near the top. If Instagram is always first, it collects a few extra answers every month, and you can’t see how many. Showing the options in a random order for each buyer spreads that effect across all options. Keep “Other” at the end, where people look for it.

Wording and placement

• Make it the first question. Some buyers answer only one question, so ask the one you need most.
• Use the plain wording. “How did you hear about us?” is clear to everyone. “Which touchpoint influenced your purchase?” is not.
• Leave it optional. A buyer who is forced to answer often taps the first option to get past it.
• Allow one answer per buyer. With multiple choice, one order counts toward several channels, and revenue per channel becomes hard to read.

Change options without losing your history

You will want to adjust the list after the first month. In Post Purchase Surveys, editing an option’s label keeps its past answers, so fixing a typo or a name is safe. If a channel is really new, add a new option instead of renaming an old one. Otherwise last month’s answers for the old channel will appear under the new name. If you delete an option, its past answers stay in the reports as “Removed option”.

Tag each order with the answer

In Post Purchase Surveys you can give each option an order tag, for example pps-podcast. When a buyer picks that option, the app adds the tag to the order a few minutes after checkout.

With the tag on the order you can filter your orders by channel in Shopify, and you can automate with Shopify Flow:

1. Create a workflow with a Scheduled time trigger that runs once a day.

   Don’t start it from “Order created”. The survey tag arrives a few minutes after the order exists, so at that moment the order has no tag yet.

2. Add Get order data with a query for the tag, for example tag:pps-podcast, limited to orders created in the last day.
3. For each order found, add the action Add customer tags, for example heard-via-podcast.

   Customer segments in Shopify, and most email tools, filter on customer tags. Copying the answer to the customer makes it usable in your marketing.

Flow’s list of triggers changes over time. If your store offers a trigger for added order tags, you can use that instead of the schedule.

Use a fixed prefix such as pps- so these tags never collide with your other tags. Shopify tags can’t contain commas, and Post Purchase Surveys accepts tags of up to 40 characters.

Read the “Other” answers

Once a month, read what people typed under “Other”. When the same source shows up several times, add it as an option. People also type more than you asked for, such as “my sister Jane told me, her email is…”. Post Purchase Surveys removes email addresses, phone numbers and introduced names before the answer is saved, and shows a short note under the box. The privacy guide explains how far that goes.

Read next

• Post-purchase attribution: which channels bring in the revenue
• How to add a post-purchase survey to Shopify