Should you Create a Survey in Google Forms in 2022? Here’s Why NOT

Surveys are popular tools nowadays used by all sorts of businesses worldwide for various reasons. They allow businesses to collect honest feedback, opinions, and responses from customers, as well as use that information to improve their business on many levels. Since you clicked on this article, you’re probably looking for a tool to create surveys with. In fact, you might be even considering using Google Forms provided by Google for this purpose. If that’s the case, we are here to help you get rid of this idea. In particular, this article presents you with 5 reasons why you shouldn’t create a survey in Google Forms – but instead, ideally, pick a different survey solution. 

Without beating around the bush, let’s get down to business. 

What are survey tools like Google Forms useful for?

There are a number of reasons why businesses use survey tools, and particularly Google Forms. 

For example, they wish to collect customer feedback quickly and easily. Another reason could stem from the need to gather valuable data for making marketing decisions. 

What’s more, tools like Google Forms are also useful when businesses want to generate leads, increase engagement, as well as monitor customer satisfaction. 

Finally, any business owner looking to improve their overall business workflows shouldn’t ignore the power of surveys – they’re great for this purpose!

Why should you not use Google Forms to create surveys in 2022? Top 5 reasons

Google Forms is a worldwide known solution. Data suggests that it’s used by over 77 thousand unique domains and on nearly 100 thousand different websites. Without a doubt, the top countries using Google Forms are the United States, Japan, India and Russia. What’s more, this tool is highly liked by people from sectors like science and education, arts and entertainment, as well as computer electronics and technology such as an online computer store. 

Now you may be wondering: “If this tool is so popular among countries worldwide and across various industries, why should I not use it?”. And you’re right for thinking this way. What you don’t know, however, is the amount of shortcomings and downsides that come with using Google Forms. Get to know them now: 

Limited design customization options

First of all, anyone who has used Google Forms before knows well how limited this tool is in terms of customizing your survey template. In fact, we will go one step further and argue that the customization features are pretty much non-existent.

That’s because there’s very little room for your own designs, and Google Forms doesn’t offer much on their own within their feature availability.

Apart from question types, the only things possible to customize are colors and fonts. Now, imagine there are tools out there allowing you to customize your surveys every step of the way: fonts, layouts, graphics, colors, sizes and more. 

Now, that’s much better than basic templates, isn’t it? 

If you’re looking for little customization space, Google Forms will be perfect for you. That’s because it’s a simple design type of a solution. However, if you like to add a little of your creativity and some personal touch to your surveys, as well as use robust options, Google Forms is not the choice for you!

Lack of 3rd party integrations

Moving on, let’s talk about 3rd party integrations now, or their lack thereof when it comes to Google Forms.

While Google claims to offer interesting add-ons, including 3rd party ones, the reality is that most of them are rather poor and buggy or are connected directly with Google, like Google Docs, Google Drive and others:

“You can extend Google Forms with add-ons that help users construct new surveys, establish connectivity to third-party systems, and integrate your Forms data with other Google Workspace applications (like Google Sheets).” source

Moreover, most of them do not even guarantee that they’ll be visible to potential respondents:

“Note: Forms add-ons only extend the Forms editor itself, where the forms are constructed. Forms add-ons can’t extend the form that is presented to potential respondents.” source

If that’s the case, can we even talk about them as real integrations? Maybe, but only for you as a survey owner. Now, what’s the point of integrations like this? The correct answer is: no point.

Google Forms is for you if you don’t care too much about cool, fun and engaging integrations for your respondents. If you do – don’t create a survey in Google Forms as you won’t really be able to use them. 

Basic reporting and analytics features

If you’ve conducted surveys before, you perfectly know how important it is to analyze the data you gather. Depending on the purpose and nature of your survey, there might be a lot of things you’ll want to measure and analyze. You might even want to measure your results against each other. 

As for reporting and analytics, Google Data in Google Forms once again does not seem to offer anything better than its competitors in the field of online surveys. In fact, Google’s features are the absolute bare minimum. Here’s what this entails: 

1. questions and responses tab – This tab allows you to toggle between your form’s questions and survey responses.
2. questions and responses tab – This tab allows you to toggle between your form’s questions and survey responses.
3. questions and responses tab – This tab allows you to toggle between your form’s questions and survey responses.
4. questions and responses tab – This tab allows you to toggle between your form’s questions and survey responses.
5. questions and responses tab – This tab allows you to toggle between your form’s questions and survey responses.

If this range of features satisfies you, then you’re completely fine with using Google Forms.  As you can see though, there is nothing interesting or original about them – it’s literally the basics. As a matter of fact, they could be much better designed, to avoid having to go to Google Spreadsheets for example. 

If access to more intelligent features is something you’re after, it’s time to look for something different than Google Forms for your survey questions!

Technical limitations

If the above reasons don’t convince you that Google Forms is not the most sustainable choice out there, this one certainly will. 

Imagine that you’re looking to create a survey with lots of images and text, and half way down the process of creating it you find out that… there’s no more space left. As a result, you end up with an unfinished survey, as well as wasted time and energy.

All of this because Google Forms only accepts:

1. texts up to 500 Kb, 
2. file uploads, like images, up to 2 Mb,
3. spreadsheets with a maximum of 256 cells or 40 sheets. 

Now that’s pretty annoying, isn’t it? While this shouldn’t be a problem with smaller surveys, it can quickly turn into a serious one when you can’t finish a slightly longer survey with more questions and images. 

Ultimately, the decision whether Google Forms is good or not will heavily depend on your current needs. However, do remember that it’s always easier when you have tools that are easy to scale up and down with than when you have ones which don’t offer much flexibility. 

Poor placement options

Last but not least, it’s worth noting that Google Forms offers highly limited placement options. 

Think about where you want to display your Google Forms survey. For lead generation, you probably should send the survey to your email addresses on your subscription list. This is a quite solid option, considering the fact that the potential customer will see a link and click on it, to be then taken to a new tab or window in their browser.

Nevertheless, you can accomplish much more than that. With modern survey tools, you can present your surveys in a variety of locations. Examples include:

1. Widgets, as a part of your page,
2. Home pages,
3. Mobile apps,
4. Landing pages,
5. Pop-ups,
6. And others

Using Google Forms, you can only view a survey as an independent page, which makes visitors click away from your website. By doing this, you hurt your bounce rate and discourage visitors from taking another action on your website, such as checking out another product or adding the existing one to their carts.

So, what survey tool should I use then? Youengage as a Google Forms survey alternative

Today, survey tools have many attractive and engaging features, like responsive, mobile-friendly designs, easy navigation and clear call to action in real time. Sadly, Google Forms does not seem to be keeping up with the trends.

As you can see, Google Forms have a basic set of features that are great for simple tasks. Ultimately, however, they will fail as soon as you try to get some real and more complex work done. 

All because there is little to no responsiveness, you can’t really implement any interesting integrations and the survey placement possibilities are close to non-existent.

What should you use then? Today’s market offers various solutions that significantly outperform Google Forms in terms of additional settings, functionality, user experience and more. One example of such a solution is of course Youengage.

In essence, Youengage’s surveys do the same thing as a Google Form, but with additional features that your marketing and sales teams will love, and so will your survey respondents! Starting from collecting form responses, through importing your list of questions, all the way up to distinguishing question types and other, deeper questions.

Here are some of the major reasons why Youengage is worth your attention rather than Google Forms:

1. you get a nice, modern look, with various options like dropdown questions, advanced question types, smartphone questions, business survey questions and more
2. there is no need to hire a developer to develop your perfect, desired survey form,
3. you have access to real integrations with tools like Hubspot, Slack, MailChimp and Zapier,
4. you get an endless amount of original templates – when you create a survey in Google Forms, you don’t get that
5. there is more in the package, including quizzes, questionnaires, quick polls, assessments, live engagement tools and more. 

If this sounds like something you’d like to try out, don’t hesitate and try Youengage out today – it’s a business product of very high quality. You don’t lose anything for trying, and you could gain an amazing survey development experience that will change the way you do surveys forever. So, what are you waiting for?

Start creating surveys like a pro!

And that’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed this blog post. By now, you should know what survey tools are used for. Moreover, you should also be able to say why not to create a survey in Google Forms as it is not the best possible solution you could go for. Today, there are far better tools out there with richer and more advanced features than just basic, necessary ones.

One of them is the aforementioned YouEngage solution – a powerful tool with both basic tools and complex features for more advanced users. Not only is it budget-friendly, rich in features and has a great UI, but also will make your survey design journey far more pleasurable. 

If you’d like to know how to get started with Youengage, be sure to sign up and there will be plenty of guides waiting for you there that will answer all the types of questions you might have. So, as you can see, there’s no need to create a survey in Google Forms any longer!