Making your survey anonymous can encourage more people to take part and give honest opinions, particularly if they are discouraged by the idea of providing personal details. This is also a useful feature if a survey deals with sensitive information.
Activating the "Anonymous Survey" feature means that the respondent’s IP address is discarded as soon as the respondent visits the survey. While an IP address needs to be transmitted to us as part of the TCP or UDP connection, it is not stored anywhere and there is no opportunity for it to be observed by a user.
It should be noted that, even with this feature activated, surveys asking for information that can be linked to a person cannot be considered anonymous. This includes questions within the survey, or information in a custom variable passed in through a tracking link. Read more about GDPR compliance
Enabling Anonymous Responses
To enable anonymous responses:
- Go to the Collect page of your survey.
- Hover over the Tracking Link you wish to anonymise, select Settings.
- Under Link Settings, check the Anonymous Survey box.
Responses that arrive via this tracking link will now have their IP address discarded. Repeat these steps with any new tracking links you create to anonymise all responses to your survey.
Other Features to Consider
Email / SMS Distribution
For surveys distributed via email or SMS, the respondent’s contact information (email/mobile number) is stored and tracked with the response, but is inaccessible to the user. This is necessary for the reminder function to work. See Creating and Using Contact Lists for how to enable anonymous results for email/SMS distribution.
Save and Continue
When using the Save and Continue feature, the respondent's name and email address is stored by SmartSurvey. This is necessary for save and continue to function. If save and continue is enabled without anonymous surveys also being enabled, the respondents name and email will be visible within the reporting.
Google Analytics
If intergrating Google Analytics with a survey, follow the process stated here for anonymising IP addresses sent to Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.