How to analyse trends in survey data

Trending Data

Spotting trends as they happen is an invaluable tool when performing ongoing market research. When the wind changes it's vital a brand has the right information, insight and intelligence to respond.

We've built Tabx to empower research on tracker projects; it contains all the tools a researcher needs to quickly feedback to their client and even let the client see for themselves:

• Unlimited projects
• Unlimited data appends (add data to your project)
• Multiple "Quick Calculations" like mean average, index and NPS
• Quickly craftable, branded charts on data driven dashboards

The Index quick-calculation adjusts any mean score onto a 0 - 100 scale.

How-to

For this example, our project contains two variables we want to visualize to spot trends over time:

• Brand Awareness - a scale from codes 0 - 5
• Wave - in this case months

To start, we go to Tabx's Dashboard tool. We could do some steps in the Interrogate tool, but as we'll see later, we will take advantage of the layering system only found on Dashboards. 

Note: Every step in the following sequence is the click of a single button (per step) in the settings dialogue for that chart. The whole process takes less than 30 seconds!

1. The default chart looks as follows, after selecting the Brand Awareness variable:

2. Next, we apply the Wave variable as the break.

3. Then we turn on "Chart Percentages"

4. When we select "Stacked Column" as the chart type, we can see there's a small gap at the top of May, July and August's bars:

5. To fix this, we set the chart's accuracy to 1 decimal place:

6. We can see now the greater the amount of green and blue, the more respondents were aware of this brand, and the brand reaches peak awareness in April, with a slump in February. In our fictional dataset, the company responded at the end of February with an Ad campaign that boosted awareness over summer. This chart would be good to present as-is (after a little branding), however to really drive the point home, we're going to layer over the top a line chart. The first step is to duplicate the original chart and select the "Index" quick calculation:

7. Now we can select "Marked Line" as the chart type for our new chart:

8. Let's make the new chart's background transparent (and the line itself temporarily white so we can see what we're doing!). We also turn off the chart grid, legend, value and category axes.

9. After dragging the new line chart over the top of the original chart, we can adjust the line colour to stand out. We also turned the underlying chart's marks off to prevent cluttered numbers everywhere. Now, this chart has impact, with a clear line indicating average (or index adjusted) awareness over time.

10. As the final step, we've quickly branded this chart set to Tabx's colours by adjusting the background colour, axes font and title colour.

Try yourself

Tabx is free to register with. Free licenses can upload 2 projects, each with a maximum of 1000 respondents and 200 variables. When it takes less than 5 minutes to create charts like this, why not upload some of your own data and see for yourself?