Product Tips - Preventing Spam Attacks

Who doesn't hate spam?

Did you know that Clicktools can help you prevent spam attacks and multiple submissions on your forms? Typically, attackers who access your survey or form will attempt to respond multiple times. This type of attack could be either automated or from a single malicious user.

Here are some tips to help reduce the impact of these attacks:

1- Create a unique link.

Using a unique link (called a personal URL in Clicktools) means that re-accessing the link will just overwrite the previous response. A single response can only be synched once into your CRM environment. You can also have the link expire after the first submission to prevent subsequent completions.

Unique links are available when deploying from Clicktools. If you are deploying directly from your CRM environment, it is possible to create a personal URL with a bit of customization.

Remember that personal links relate only to specific contacts from your CRM or Clicktools environment. If you have a survey or form accessible externally on a website, a Personal URL would not be used.

2- Set multiple responses to 'No' when using a shared URL.

This places a cookie on the respondents browser preventing multiple responses being submitted from the same computer within a 30 day period. Clicking the link again would bring up a previous response.

3- Utilize an introduction page in your survey or form.

Add an introduction page so that the submit button is not available on the first page of the survey. This can help prevent automated attacks.

4- Ask a validation question.

Add a question at the beginning of the survey to validate the response. Something like a text question asking, "What color is a banana?" You can then add a condition to your survey mapping that will only synch data to your CRM environment where the correct value (i.e. 'Yellow or 'yellow') has been entered.

Rose Cruse

Product Manager

Product Tips - Working With QR Codes

Do you use QR codes?

You've all seen them. They're everywhere. In magazines, catalogues, at trade shows. "Scan this code with your smart phone to receive a special offer!"

This type of technology is called "QR" or "quick response" codes. A QR code is a type of two-dimensional matrix barcode often used to represent a web link (URL). Anyone with a smart phone and one of the widely available free scanner apps can scan and read a QR code. Upon scanning on the smart phone, the user is immediately taken to the URL link. This is much quicker than having to type in a (sometimes long) URL.

QR codes are easily generated using one of the QR generators available of the web. Just Google "QR code creator" to find one. Several of them are free.

When creating your QR code, you'll have to know what URL you want to direct people to. This could be a specific survey URL, your web site, or a targeted landing page for a special offer. If you are using the Team and above editions of Clicktools, you could make use of the 'Actions' functionality to redirect respondents from a generic Clicktools landing page to a specific landing page or survey.

Once you have generated your QR code with the desired URL, simply load this into Clicktools as an image. This can be included in your Clicktools generated emails, newsletters, etc.

Scan this QR code to access the Clicktools page on the salesforceappexchange: http://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016aHQEAY

As the use of QR codes is not yet widespread, do not forget to give your respondents some guidance as to what to do and always provide an alternative means to access to the URL link.

You could implement the same approach for Blippar™ as well.

So, tell us! How are you using QR codes?

Rose Cruse

Product Manager

Product Tips - Sampling

When you see a chart in your dashboard analysing the responses received from one of your Clicktools surveys (i.e., Net Promoter), how do you know if the views are really reflective of those in your target audience?

The term 'sampling' is used to represent the number of people who must complete your survey in order for you to get a representative view of your target audience.
 
The term 'confidence level' represents how often the true percentage of the population would pick an answer that lies within the confidence interval. A confidence level of 95% means you can be 95% certain; the 99% confidence level means you can be 99% certain etc.

Combining the confidence level and interval in our example, we can be 95% sure that between 85% and 95% of the population would choose answer "A". The confidence interval is the plus-or-minus figure reported alongside survey results. For example, if 90% percent of your sample pick answer "A" and you are using a confidence interval of 5, it is fair to say that if the entire target audience had answered the question, between 85% (90-5) and 95% (90+5) would have picked answer "A" also.

The tables below outline how many completed responses you need to treat the results as reflective of the whole of your population for different combinations of confidence interval, confidence level and target population.

Most research is carried out using 95% confidence level with a 3% or 5% confidence interval (highlighted in green and orange).

		Confidence Interval
Population size	Confidence Level	+/- 1%	+/-2%	+/- 3%	+/- 4%	+/- 5%
100	95%	99	96	92	86	80
	99%	99	98	95	91	87
1000	95%	906	706	516	375	278
	99%	943	806	649	510	400
10000	95%	4,899	1,936	964	566	370
	99%	6,246	2,938	1,561	942	624
100,000 or more	95%	8,763	2,345	1,056	597	383
	99%	14,267	3,994	1,815	1,029	661

So, for example, if you have 1,000 customers, you need results from 278 customers to be 95% confident in your results to a level of + or - 5%.

Now that you have confidence that your responses are truly reflective, be sure to give all the responses you receive equal billing. If using NPS, use your detractor's views to make improvements and identify your promoters to spread the word.

Clicktools Analytics allows you to analyse your data by combining responses to questions and then publishing the results in the form of a chart. These charts can be grouped and presented in a dashboard, providing you with real time feedback. This functionality is available within the Professional, Enterprise and Global editions.

Rose Cruse

Product Manager