Reading survey results
Completion rate, per-question charts, and what the numbers don't tell you.
Go to Forms for the site, pick a form in the dropdown, and switch from Submissions to Stats.
Submissions is the raw list — one row per person. Stats is the same data added up: how many started, how many finished, and what they picked.
If the form has no choice or rating questions, Stats says so and points you back to the editor. A contact form has nothing to chart — names and messages are answers you read, not answers you count.
Completion
Three numbers at the top: started, responses, and completion — responses divided by starts.
"Started" means someone actually began filling the form in on the live page, not just loaded it. That's the number that tells you whether a survey is too long: 300 starts and 40 responses is a length problem, not a traffic problem.
Two honest caveats the panel shows you itself:
- Completion is only available from the date tracking shipped. Responses collected before that still count as responses but have no matching "start".
- It can read over 100%. Blocked beacons, older responses and deleted submissions all do that. It isn't a bug in your survey.
Switch the period between daily and all time.
Per-question charts
Each question gets a row per option with a bar and a share. Under it: how many answered and how many skipped.
- Multi choice also shows picks per person — "1.8 picks per person" tells you whether people are choosing carefully or ticking everything.
- Rating with a scale shows average, median and range, not just the distribution.
- Single choice shows an average too, but only if you turned on Options have a low-to-high order on that question. Without it, averaging Red / Blue / Green would be nonsense, so Tessolo doesn't.
- NPS is broken into promoters, passives and detractors.
Options nobody picked still appear, at zero. That's deliberate: a zero row is how you find out an option was worded badly, and it's how you check that a prize nobody chose really got no votes.
View answers opens the individual responses behind a row.
Questions you changed or removed
The charts describe the form as it looks on the page right now. Questions that used to be there are listed separately under Past questions, so old answers aren't silently dropped.
If a past question is really the same question with new wording, Tessolo tells you the column name to reuse: put it into the old question's Advanced → Column name in submissions and the historical answers merge back in.
This is the reason the surveys page says to set an explicit column name before rewording a live question. Doing it up front avoids the merge entirely.
Exporting
Export stats gives you the summary — one row per option, with counts and shares — ready to paste into a report.
For the raw answers use Export CSV on the Submissions tab instead. The stats export is capped; when it is, the file says so in a final row rather than quietly stopping.
What the numbers won't tell you
- Who answered. Responses aren't tied to an identity unless you asked for an email.
- Whether one person answered twice. See submission rules for what "one per person" can and can't promise.
- Why. A free-text question — even one — is usually worth more than a fourth rating scale.