Introduction to Qualtrics

The Quotas section of Qualtrics allows you to count how many respondents have met a certain condition or conditions in your survey, and to control what happens when the quota is met. To access this section of Qualtrics, click on the ‘Quotas’ icon on the navigation menu at the far left of the screen. It looks like this:

The conditions used for quotas can be based on survey questions, embedded data or other quotas, and there are a range of different things you can specify to happen when the quota is met. For example, if the survey quota has already been filled you could end the survey for the respondent, you could hide a question or a block, or you could make use of branch logic, skip logic or display logic to customise what happens (for example, you could use display logic to hide a certain choice or choices for a question if the quota has been met). You can also use a quota to limit the total number of people who take your survey.

For details on all the different ways you can use quotas explore the Qualtrics support page on quotas.

Example

Let’s use a quota to limit the number of people who take your Test Survey to 50. To do this, click on the Quotas icon and on Add a quota, then select Simple Logic Quota and press Create quota. Select the name of the quota (currently ‘New Quota’, at the top left of screen) and change it to something more descriptive (for example, Response Limit), then adjust the quota from 100 to 50 by changing the value in the box at the top right of screen.

Next, set the condition for when the quota will be incremented. In this instance you want every survey respondent to be counted as part of the quota, so keep Question selected and choose a question in your survey that everyone will see – for example the first question with the survey introduction. Click Select Choice and choose the question again, then keep Is Displayed selected.

Finally, scroll down and choose what you want to happen when the quota has been met (select Quota options to expand this section if required). In this case the best choice is to Prevent all new survey sessions, and you can then choose to show a custom inactive survey message (you can create this in a similar way to an end of survey message, as described in the End of survey message section of the Survey builder page). You then also have the choice to Keep & record or Delete over quota options (which in this instance would only be relevant in the event that two people submitted their survey at the same time).

To test that your quota works in the way you expect, you can increase the quota to the maximum value by selecting the 0 in 0/50 at the top right of screen, changing the quota count to 50 and pressing Save and Confirm. If you then preview the survey, you should see your inactive survey message displayed. Once you have checked it is working correctly, go back into Quotas and either change the quota count back to 0 in the same way as you previously set it to 50, or select the name of the quota from the left hand menu (i.e. Response Limit), click on the three dots to display the menu and then select Reset quota and Confirm.