Simple question, right? But I’m afraid it doesn’t have a simple answer. There is no magic number when it comes to quiz questions.
Firstly, it depends on the quiz. If you’re at a pub quiz, you want it to take at least two or three hours, because it’s a social occasion and you want to make a night of it. On the other hand, if you’re tempted to do an online trivia quiz, say something that pops up on your social media feed, you want quick results so you can get that instant gratification and continue scrolling on to the next dopamine hit.
When it comes to online lead generation style quizzes, such as SMA Digital’s Specialised Marketing Assessment, the key to working out how many questions to include is to think about what your audience actually wants and needs.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at what we know about the typical attention span in 2022 so we can understand why it’s so important to get the length of your quiz right. We’re going to give you some tools and techniques to help you decide on the perfect number of questions for your niche as well as a few best practices based on our knowledge and experience of our client’s most successful quizzes.
Attention span of internet users
The modern internet user’s attention span is one of the biggest challenges for marketers. It has been declining for many years and studies show that since 2000 it has reduced from 12 to eight seconds, yep, that’s it.
That means that by this point in this article, your mind has already wandered at least five times! Hopefully, I’m able to keep grabbing your attention back so you stay until the end, go on, you don’t want to miss out, do you?
Why is attention span so ridiculously low in 2022? Well, it’s not that ridiculous when you break down all the contributing factors, the biggest being the internet. We have the world at our fingertips, we live among an internet of things, smartphones and wearables, all pinging and notifying us of everything from breaking news to when the washing machine cycle is done. Throw into the mix our ‘always on’ lifestyles and jobs that are becoming more blurred as the traditional working week is getting swapped out for more flexible arrangements. Then add to that a rising mental health crisis, with conditions like depression and anxiety taking their toll on our ability to focus. When you add it all up, it’s amazing we can still pay any attention at all!
What does this mean for your quiz?
It means that getting people to stay and complete it will be challenging, the average web page visit duration is less than one minute, and visitors often leave a page after just 10 to 20 seconds. While they are with you, they will likely skim read the content, studies show that users read an average of 28% of the words on a webpage.
But don’t despair as this is exactly why quiz marketing works. Fortunately, the quiz format is highly engaging due to its interactivity and the sense of working towards finding out something about themselves is what keeps people hooked.
SMA Digital’s quizzes include attention grabbing titles and eye-catching landing pages that entice users to hit the start button. Once the quiz is completed, the results page delivers their score and personalised feedback using rich media like videos and charts, short paragraphs and bulleted lists, all of which help catch and retain your audience’s attention.
Furthermore, once your quiz is live, you will be able to track metrics such as abandonment rates, that show you not only how many people are being drawn away but at what point they give up on the quiz. This valuable data allows you to tweak your questions and adjust the overall duration so you can boost your completion rate.
What will make your audience complete your quiz?
The best way to get your target audience’s attention and keep it is to make sure you know exactly who you’re talking to. Ask yourself, what are their key pain points and how do they talk about them? What words and scenarios would describe their challenges or goals and resonate with them on a deep level? Incorporate these things into your questions.
Once you’ve drafted your title and some questions, put yourself in your target niche’s shoes. Think about how busy they are and how long they’d be willing to spend on this. Look out for repetition and try to make sure every question is pertinent and relevant to the goal of the quiz.
It’s also worth considering the stage your target quiz audience is at, are they already in your funnel, or not? If they’re warm leads, they’re likely to invest more time in what you’re offering them, if not, keep it short, sharp and sweet enough to catch their eye.
Best practices
Ok, so I realise I haven’t actually told you how many is too many, or too little, questions yet. Well, that’s because there is no one-size-fits-all. When you work with us, we get to know you, your offering and most importantly, your audience. We help you define the goals for your quiz and all of this allows us to advise how long the quiz should be.
But, having built quizzes for over 700 businesses, we have picked up a few tricks that we know get tangible results, so here are our best practices for setting the length and duration of your quiz:
- Every quiz is different, but in quiz land, less is always more, you can’t have too few questions, KEEP IT SHORT is basically what I’m trying to say. As a rule of thumb, shoot for around 10 questions plus two to three segmentation questions.
- Questions are divided into topics, like how a pub quiz is divided into rounds. Except rather than ‘guess the ‘90’s banger intro’, the topic is a key area of their business and something you offer solutions for, such as ‘Strategic planning’ or ‘Admin’. The more topics your quiz has, the fewer questions per topic it should have. For example, if you have 10 topics, you should limit yourself to one question per topic. If you have three topics, you can get away with about three questions per topic.
- It’s not just the number of questions that counts, it’s the wording of them as well. Your questions need to be clear and concise, preferably they should fit on one line. Remember, most people will access your quiz on a mobile device, they don’t want to be scrolling through a long form question.
- Finally, Get the level right, you want to challenge them and ask thought provoking questions that will get them to identify gaps and realise why they need your help. But you don’t want to go so deep or challenging that you overwhelm or confuse them, and they abandon it. If your questions are more quick fire in style, you can squeeze in a few more, but if they are thought provokers, keep it to a minimum.
Conclusion
There is no magic number but hopefully we’ve given you enough guidance that will help you hit the right mark for your audience and your goals. Remember, keep it short, engaging and aligned with what your audience wants.
Check out our case studies to see examples of successful quizzes that have generated thousands of leads.
If you follow these best practices, when that Facebook notification pops up in the middle of your ideal client’s quiz experience, they’ll think to themselves ‘that can wait’.
