Setting the Challenge
Before we launched Thrive Quiz Builder, we not only gave our Thrive Suite users almost a month of exclusive access to the plugin, we also issued them a challenge:
Build a quiz for your business and submit it in under 12 days.
The 3 winners were promised to be featured on our blog and Facebook page where we’d then spend $50 to boost their quiz on Facebook to their specific audience.
Honestly, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. It was a quick deadline with only a live webinar for training...
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After the deadline, I jumped in and TOOK EVERY QUIZ SUBMITTED. By doing this, two things became apparent:
- Our customers are quite the talented and creative bunch, doing some terrific things online.
- I’m a below average boyfriend with an above average love for romance who is good at money management, drinking wine and knows absolutely nothing about the state of Idaho.
A lot of participants took some serious action, and I want to thank each and every one of them for participating.
But now the contest is over, so I'll be showing you our favorite quizzes. I'll highlight what each winning submission does wonderfully and tips on how each could be improved.
If you’re struggling to come up with an idea for a quiz, here's three examples from people just like you, paired with an in-depth analysis so you can immediately create a great quiz for your own business.
Note: Quizzes are ordered by when they were submitted and not by their ranking.
1) The "Are You A Real Idahoan?" Quiz
About This Quiz/Website
This quiz was created by Chad at SplitBoise.com, which is an Idaho based Real Estate website helping their clients save money on commissions when buying or selling a home.
The quiz itself is titled “Are you a Real Idahoan?” and aims to test the takers knowledge on all things Idaho. The end goal is to get the taker to opt-in for a free report on Idaho housing prices and share their quiz results over social media. You can take the quiz here.
What the Quiz Does Well
1) Clever & Engaging
This quiz is a fun way to engage both new residents and proud old timers of the U.S. potato state by trying to quantify their Idaho-ness. But more importantly, it targets a specific audience relevant to Chad’s Idaho based real estate website.
2) Great for Social Shares
This quiz is a great example of a social sharing type quiz because it takes advantage of creating a group mentality—one of the key elements we've identified in quizzes going viral.
3) It's Actually Challenging
The quiz has specific questions about Idaho like: “The Boise Greenbelt is how many miles long?” This is good for two reasons:
- It makes people want to take the quiz over and over trying to get a better score.
- Because it's challenging, it has the potential to get more social shares as people who score well will want to show off the results to their friends.
How We'd Make it Even Better
1) More Pictures
Pictures make the questions more visually appealing, so you should have one for every question.
The more visually appealing your quiz, the more engaging it will be—leading to more people seeing the results page where your conversion goal is waiting.
Even a simple addition of one photo can help people stay engaged.
2) Add a Social Sharing Badge
A social sharing badge is an attractive way to let your quiz takers show off their results, especially for overachievers who score high on the test.
And because this particular quiz is about Idaho and not real estate specifically, quiz takers are more likely to show it off to their Idahoan friends. Providing a cool social badge for them is a great way to encourage this. Here’s how to easily create one in Thrive Quiz Builder.
3) Better Flow on The Results Page
Right now the results are light-hearted and fun, but there’s no real transition between the results and the call to action, which makes it seem jarring.
With a little change to the copy, it could be first-class. For example, my result was ‘Iowan not Idahoan’ and it immediately starts talking about the free report with data Zillow—an online real estate marketplace—doesn’t even have.
To make it flow better you could add something like “we get it, you’re new here. Here’s some inside info to make you more of a local...” with some fun facts about Idaho or links to fun news stories.
Then you could transition into something like, “If you just moved here and are looking to buy a house you should check out our free report…”
2) The "Are You Ready to Date?"Quiz
About This Quiz/Website
This quiz was created by Dalila at BeHereAndNow.com, which is a website focused on helping divorced female clients heal by providing divorce recovery work, so they can have a healthy relationship again.
The quiz itself is titled “Are you Ready to Date Again?” It’s six questions long and has an opt-in gate at the end of the quiz to collect leads.
In order to get your quiz results you must enter your details in the opt-in gate.
After putting in your info you get taken to the results page, which gives a quick explanation and then a social sharing badge.
The quiz result page.
The goal of the quiz is to gather leads by asking quiz takers where they are in the process of healing from divorce to help them return to the dating world in a healthy way. You can take the quiz here.
What the Quiz Does Well
1) Great for List Building
This quiz is a great example of a list building type quiz because the quiz ties in flawlessly to the goal of Dalila’s website—to embrace divorced female clients who need help healing. What a perfect way to use a quiz to find high value leads for her business.
2) Nailed the Splash Page Copy
“When you told him ‘yes’ years ago, you didn’t expect to be single now.” would leave any divorced woman nodding her head in agreement and wondering if they’re ready to date again, which means more people pressing the "Start the Quiz" button.
3) Engaging & Vivid Questions
Every one of Dalila's questions has a picture relating to the question and all of the answers paint a vivid image in the mind of the quiz taker.
If you can invoke this in your own quizzes you'll have people clicking all the way until the end instead of closing it out of boredom.
How We'd Make it Even Better
Tighter focus. As I mentioned before, this is a great list building type quiz, however, it’s missing the mark in a few areas to make it a powerful lead generation tool.
Here’s what we’d change to improve the focus to make it better at gathering qualified leads:
1) Remove the Opt-In Gate & Social Sharing Badge
Since this is more of a sensitive topic, I’d imagine most people won’t want to share their results if they showed off how damaged they are.
Instead, we recommend Dalila uses the results page to showcase her skills as a therapist.
She could give a semi-detailed plan of action to get back into the dating world. If it's done correctly, the person reading will receive enough compelling information to desire more. Now it's an easy transition to offer “get your full results, enter your name and email below” with an opt-in form.
2) Make it A Branching Quiz Instead of a Linear Quiz
Right now the quiz is linear. This turns the questions redundant because every question is a different scenario where you get the same information about the quiz taker: they are either ready to date, or unprepared to date.
This is a great opportunity to set up a branching logic quiz. Once a quiz taker indicates they are ready to date, the quiz should end as this visitor isn’t a lead Dalila is looking for.
However, for those quiz takers unprepared to date, Dalila should use the quiz to dig deeper into finding out their specific issues. For example:
- Trust issues
- Anger/hatred towards men
- Fear
Dalila could then use their answers to create specific results pages. This will leave the quiz taker feeling like Dalila read their mind and much more likely to jump at the chance of signing up for the full report to help solve their specific problem.
3) The Healthy Habits Quiz
About This Quiz/Website
This quiz was created by Latrice at WholeSista.com, which is a website focused on helping women cultivate a balanced life of love, family, health, money, and happiness.
The quiz itself is titled “Are your Healthy Habits a Little Flaky?” It’s eleven questions long and has a results page with a social sharing badge and an opt-in form giving people who sign up their detailed results and a bonus gift. You can take the quiz here.
What the Quiz Does Well
1) Great Use of Dynamic Content
Dynamic content allows you to show different content to different people based on how they answered the quiz questions. Latrice does something exceptionally creative and shows different videos on the results pages.
Sure, having to create multiple videos will take more time, but the effect it has on the quiz taker will be massive for two reasons:
- It will seem like you’re speaking directly to the quiz taker!
- If you look at the results page above, you’ll see you need to sign-up to get the full results. The quiz taker has just spent all this time answering questions and now they can’t get what they’re after until they enter their details. This can leave the visitors feeling a bit ripped off. However, using a personalized video like this helps to soften the blow, and turns a negative roadblock into a positive interaction with Latrice’s brand.
2) Great Variation of Question Topics
Latrice does a great job covering many different topics in her quiz. She asks questions about meditation, drinking water, exercising and eating.
This is a great tactic to build into your quizzes because it allows you to find out a lot about what your audience likes or needs help with.
Then you'll be able to use the reports in Thrive Quiz Builder to zero in on high leverage areas for your readers and write content you know they'll be interested in...instead of having to just guess.
How We'd Make it Even Better
1) Only Show What Would be Interesting
Right now the results page is cluttered with a video, opt-in form AND a social sharing badge. There’s too many call to actions, which could lead to decision paralysis.
You should focus on creating one goal per dynamic result because right now, the free email course on building healthy habits won’t interest people who already have healthy habits and people with bad habits won't want to share a badge painting themselves in a bad light with their friends.
Here’s where dynamic content is useful. Latrice could use it to:
- Only show a social sharing badge to the people who are a healthy habit star, because that’s something people would want to show off to their friends.
- Only show an opt-in form to people with bad habits to get the free email course.
Now she gets the best of both worlds: list growth and social shares without the clutter of trying to do it all.
2) Merge Questions to Increase Interest
Right now, Latrice has a lot of questions where the answer choices are variations of:
- Sometimes
- Always
- Never
Too many of these types of questions and you risk becoming redundant, which could bore your quiz takers before they finish.
Try to keep your question count as low as possible. Here's an example of 4 questions that could be turned into 1.
To improve this, have vivid descriptions the quiz taker can picture as your answer options.
For example, Latrice could turn all four of the above questions into one question giving her the same insights about her quiz taker.
The question could be: “You come home from a busy day at work, what does dinner look like for you?” and the answers could be something like:
- I meal prep, so I just take out my perfectly proportioned meal and eat it.
- I grab fast food on the way home or nuke the bean and cheese burrito in the freezer
- It was a busy day, but I always make time to cook for myself. Fresh organic veggies and fresh organic fruit are staples.
- I grab a ready-to-eat meal from the local market. It could be healthier, but it’s not the worst.
It's also important to streamline your quiz with minimal questions because your drop off rate will increase the more questions you have, which means less people will finish your quiz and see the results page where the conversion goal is.
Are You Ready to Design Your First Quiz?
A quiz is a fantastic tool to engage the audience of any website. It doesn't matter if you're a local real estate company or a professional therapist dealing with complex and private issues.
We held this contest to showcase how feasible it is to create great quizzes quickly with minimal training for any type of online business. It could have turned out poorly, but luckily we have some pretty talented and driven customers.
Coming up with a quiz topic for your specific niche might seem like a daunting task, but the limit is your own creativity, and because of our talented customers, now you can use the resources and ideas in the post to create something amazing on your own website.
However, if you’re still struggling to come up with an idea for a quiz for your website, tell me what your website is about in the comments below and I (and the rest of the community) will help you with ideas!
If you already have a quiz topic and want to take your quiz building skills to the next level you should register for Thrive University and take our FREE course: How to Use Quizzes to Boost Conversions.
Thank you again to everyone who submitted quizzes for the contest, I had a blast taking them. And congratulations to Chad, Dalila and Latrice for their winning quiz submissions!
This was extremely helpful! I have done only two quizzes, build fast, and one of them was extremely profitable, and I can’t wait to build more.
Love to hear that Helle! Keep quizzin’ and crushin’ it 🙂
This is truly interesting. Thank you Dave.
I’m planning to run a quiz to get leads for a detox – cleanse programm that I’ll launch soon.
I’m a bit short of ideas for questions and concept of the quiz. Obviously the goal is to segment quiz users into categories. One title that keeps floating is: Are you ready for a cleanse?
Variation: How much do you need a cleanse this spring?
Anybody can spit some catchy titles or concept to urge people to take the cleanse quiz? You’re help is much appreciated.
One variation would be to call out a very specific problem the detox cleanse would help, and hit that pain point before alluding to the fact that maybe a detox cleanse is what they need.
For example, “Do you suffer from random and unhealthy cravings? Take this quiz to find out if a Detox Cleanse would help” and a much more simple variation would be: “Do you actually need a detox cleanse?”
As for for questions/concepts I’d look for blog posts on detoxing. For example, I just did a quick google search and found a post on the benefits of cleanse. A quick read and I could use it to structure my questions…”After eating dinner, how do you normally feel?” and your answers would involve feeling bloated or low energy, which are things a cleanse might be able to solve. Hope that helps!
Yes. Thank you for pointing out a way to formulate questions about topics relared to detoxing. It’s very inspirational.
No problem! Good luck with the quiz, would love to see how it turns out!
Your suggestions on the last quiz was pure Gold!!!
Glad you found them helpful Oyekunle 🙂
The link to the first quiz, “Real Idahoan” is broken.
Sometimes I can’t technology 🙁 Thanks for pointing it out though Santiago…it’s all fixed now!
Thanks for the opportunity -re; ideas for Quiz topic. perrysenn.com. Drummer/ hoping to get (beginners) drum book /and method. launched and ultimately a membership with more in depth video lessons. Started now as “mini-lessons”. Thank you. . Perry senn.
Drumming makes me think of rock & roll and Rock & roll is cool. One idea would be to create a social sharing type quiz like: “Only a true classic rock lover can score 80% or better on this quiz”
Make the quiz challenging and include a good amount of drummer focused questions. For the people who score high on the drummer related questions you could have a specific results page for them…”Damn, you really know your drumming! Ever thought about taking up as a hobby? Here’s a book for beginners…”
Hope that gets some ideas flowing for you! Rock on man.
Great post! This has got me very excited at the possibilities.
Glad you enjoyed it, Ryan! Can’t wait to see what you come up with 🙂
This is neat, but the design of quizes, well, they don’t look very good. Is this the best designs you can showcase or is it somewhat limited in terms of design features?
Hi! These are some of the early designs but yes, we are always coming out with new templates 🙂
Thanks for your great tipps. I struggle with the topic and hope for some help. I teach how to write novels (in germany). I came up with some ideas like a funny “what stile do you write” but it seems quite complicated to create good questions and get a good endresult.
I like the idea of “Are you ready to write” like your above sample. But maybe you have some better ideas?!
Thanks for your help!
Jurenka
Hey Jurenka,
Since I love books and writing, I thought I’d jump in with a couple of thoughts here:
1. How about a quiz for readers to test which famous author they are most like? (e.g. Hermann Hesse, Gunter Grass etc), or…
2. Some kind of fun game to gently test their understanding of how to structure a novel (I’m thinking of humorous questions that poke fun at the exceedingly long descriptive passages of Thomas Hardy or Marcel Proust, or playing with narrative jumping around through time (e.g. The Time Traveller’s Wife)
Any use?
Best wishes from Scotland,
Matthew
Matthew nailed it with some great ideas! You could also do another personality type style quiz where the quiz taker finds out what fictional character they are most like!
Hey Dave!
This was very helpful! I am having trouble with my quiz though.
I run a consultancy and we help manufacturers improve their process through the “Lean” methodology.
Any ideas on what I could do?
Thanks so much!
I’m not extremely familiar with the “lean” methodology but I imagine you do some type of diagnostic to figure out if the manufacturers would be a good fit for applying some of your techniques.
You could turn that type of thing into a quiz. In your space it might be tougher to find a fun idea for a socially shareable type quiz, but you’re in a great space to create a quiz to help you find extremely qualified leads for your consulting services, similar to the “are you ready to date?” example from the post.
Hope that helps!
Thanks dave, I really appreciate it!
No problem!
Thank you so much. Your analysis of my quiz is so helpful. I’ll definitely work on it before you guys promote it. I hope it’s OK. Your ideas for the improvement are great.
Yes, of course that’s ok! Glad you found the analysis helpful and congrats again 🙂
In the examples there was something wrong. They made 3 question. When I learnd how has to ask question my teacher told that is not good to ask 3-5-7 questions because if the user not sure in answer it choose the middle answer. And this is not good for us. If it is possible it has to ask 4-6 questions.
Yup! You can ask as many or as few questions as you’d like and have as many or as few answer choices as you’d like 🙂
Hi Tamas,
you are correct when it comes to answers with qualitative feedback. Avoid a three step rating, better prepare four answers.
Example: What was your experience with ABC service?
Excellent – Okay – Bad -> people tend to opt for “okay”
better use:
Excellent – Good – somewhat okay – Bad
The number of questions itself is irrelevant.
Can a quiz-type be created such that after Question 3 or 4 the quiz taker is told that they are one general personality type (out of three possibilities), then with 3 more questions they are told that they are a specific species of that personality type (4 or more species of that type)?
Also, when the emails are captured, what back-end software does the system tie into? (for example, Infusionsoft, Actionetics, Aweber, etc)?
Hi Steven, yes, you can set up that quiz type. You’d need to create two separate quizzes and then embed your second quiz in the results page of your first quiz. This would give your visitor one result and start them on to the next quiz.
We have API connections for many different integrations. You can find a full list here: https://staging.thrivethemes.com/integrations/
Hope that helps!
Will the Quiz show the correct answers?
Hi Tom, right now you can only show the answers to all the questions in the quiz at the end, but it wouldn’t be dynamic i.e. it wouldn’t say “you missed these questions and their answers are xyz.”
However, that’s a good idea and we’ll pass it along to maybe added as a feature in a pluigin update!
Hi! I find this new feature (quizzes) very interesting but will it be somme badges to earn? I look forward using it for courses online…
Hi Cecile, glad you find it interesting 🙂
At the moment this is only a plugin for creating quizzes and not a plugin for online courses (even there is a bit of overlap). Because of this we haven’t created features for course badges to deliver to people making progress in an online course.
Hello,
I would like some help on my quiz topic. I have a German website for stressed out parents helping them with tips and strategies to enjoy parenthood again. So my ideal lead would be stressed out but doesn’t blame the children for it. They would look into their behavior and what they could do to change the challenging situation. Any ideas for a quiz?
Hi Petra,
I imagine there are different types of issues both the children and parents have that would contribute to their stress.
For example, a high energy child and a lazy child would both cause stress, but for different reasons. Same with the parent. Some might be stressed because of their job, and others might be stressed for time.
I feel like you could create a quiz with a title like “What is your household dynamic” where you’d ask questions to try and find out the underlying factors of their stress. Then you could deliver more specific tips and tactics based on what is causing the problems. Hope this helps!
Thanks for sharing this! I will finish my quiz as soon as possible.
Awesome to hear Chao! Gla dyou enjoyed the post 🙂
Great post Dave! Highly appreciated!
I have an ebook for women on how to handle/change/break up with men who cheat. Also, I have “Is He a Cheater” report that I want to make an incentive for an opt-in funnel.
Right now, I’m creating a quiz “Is He a Cheater”. It’s 7 questions on identifying cheater behaviors/traits with YES/NO responses. Only all NOs are a safe zone. The total of YES responses (1-3 or 4-7) leads to Results page with one of the two Cheater Types. No Opt-in gate but opt-in request for a detailed analysis. Opt-in on each of two Results pages leads to a separate opt-in list.
I plan to have two quiz funnels.
One, people who opted-in for a report are presented with a quiz after a while.
Two, cold-traffic to a quiz Splash page.
Now it gets interesting. It’s important for me to learn their age and current relationship status/motivation (whether they would rather change/handle him or break up, e.g. “Married and would like to divorce”). I would sneak these 2 questions too.
At the end, with some crazy matrix I made, I would combine points from basic 7 questions and relationship status/motivation response, resulting in 11 different Result pages. Crazy stuff!
If you’re still not lost, 😀 I’m wondering:
1) Where should I put Relationship status/Motivation and Age questions? At the end, after basic 7 and before the results?
2) Should I make Relationship status and Motivation separate questions? Though it would be more insightful in Reports section when it’s together, I’m afraid it would have a big drop-off.
3) What is the best way to actually deliver “detailed analysis” after they opt-in? Email with link to it? For that I would need to create a new landing page, right?
Thank you Dave very much in advance!
Hi Nebojsa!
Wow, that is quite the quiz you have in the works! You’ll definitely have to let me know when it’s all finished, because I’d love to see the final product 🙂
As for your questions:
1) My initial thinking is to put them at the end as these won’t be the most engaging of questions. However, to try and prevent dropoff I’d put an explanation before the first question to let them know how important answering the two questions are for their results.
2) Yes, I’d make them two separate questions. Even though one question will make it shorter you will be asking the quiz taker to think about two things at once and it will be much simpler for them to think about the answer if you do them one at a time. However, since you’ll have the report you’ll be able to see if there are lots of people dropping off between the questions, so if that happens, try merging them into one question and see if it helps!
3) The most seamless way for the visitor would be to set up your opt-in form to redirect them to a page on your website with their detailed results as this will allow them instant gratification. This would require a new landing page. The other option is to create PDF style reports. Each opt-in form would be tied to your email service provider (mailchimp, active campaign, etc.) and a different segment of your list. When they sign-up, they are put into the specific segment and then emailed their specific report.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions 🙂
Thank you Dave, you rock!
No problem Nebojsa!
In the How to Make it Better section of Latrice’s quiz that she could:
1) Only show a sharing badge for positive results
2) Only show an opt-in form to people who need to improve
I really like that idea. Do you have instructions somewhere of how to set up both of these inside my quiz? Thanks!
Hi Cameron, yeah the feature you’re looking for is dynamic content. It allows you to place different content based on the results a quiz taker gets. Here’s a full tutorial on how to use it: https://staging.thrivethemes.com/tkb_item/using-the-dynamic-content-feature-on-your-quiz-results-page/
Hope that helps and glad you liked the idea 🙂
Great article, thanks for sharing! I’ve just started a new social media manager business and am wanting to create a quiz that will target local business owners to find out how well, or not well they are marketing their business on social media. First of all, Is that too small of a niche for a quiz? Second, I’m struggling with a title. I was thinking something like “only 1 in 5 small businesses effectively market themselves on Social media”. I know that sounds boring, but my idea is to get the quiz taker to realize how much they don’t know about social media marketing.
Hi Brent, glad you enjoyed the article 🙂
The size of the niche really really depends on your business, but since you’re just starting it, I don’t think it will be too small of a niche at all.
As for the title, I think you’re on the right path but my initial thinking is that many local business owners barely even have a social media strategy, if they even have one. So you might want to have a more general quiz title hitting a pain point local businesses struggle with, like getting customers into their store. Then, in the quiz ask questions about social media marketing and then have the results page focused on helping them realize how little they know about social media marketing and how huge of a role it could play in bringing them more customers.
Hope that helps!
I was retargeted on FB with this post and have thoroughly enjoyed it. I was wondering if you have measured the conversion boost results and how many participants you’ve received overall via shares? We’re looking to do a personality quiz where we need about 1000 participants. And are wondering what budget to set for this. Thanks!
Hi Nitram, glad you enjoyed the post. You’ll find this post helpful for your questions:https://staging.thrivethemes.com/amazon-quiz-case-study/
Wondering, why doesn’t the Thrive quiz provide detailed results after the quiz has been taken (after having someone opt in)? So they could go through em and see which ones they got wrong and which ones they got right. It seems like that would be a basic feature of quiz results. Most people don’t wanna just see a percentage or how many points, but see which ones they got wrong and which ones were right. Since this Thrive quiz doesn’t have that, I can’t use it. I have to find something else. I figured that would be a basic thing for results.
Hi Josh,
Thank you for your comment!
We’ve had a few people ask us for a feature like this, but there hasn’t been much demand. The reason we don’t already have such a feature is because it will be very time intensive to build, if we decide to do it. Because of all the branching paths and advanced features available when building a quiz, displaying and summarizing results for a user isn’t very straight forward. 🙂