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Smart Loops allow you to quickly replicate groups of questions. Whether you are working on a monadic or sequential monadic survey design, or you have elements in your survey that need to be repeated, Smart Loops will greatly reduce your programming time and effort! Smart Loops comes with it's own interface in the Survey Editor that can be activated in a few ways.  

 

 

Adding Smart Loops: From the Question Type Menu

  1. Click on a question type icon within your survey, or the New Question button at the bottom of the survey, and select the Add a/Convert into a Smart Loop button in top right corner of the menu.
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Adding Smart Loops: From the Logic Guide

  1. Click on the Logic Guide icon in the right menu to open the aytm Logic Guide.
  2. Grab the gray handle to the right of the banner labeled Smart Loop Empty Example and drag it into the Survey Editor to activate a new Smart Loop builder.
  3. Alternatively, drag the Smart Loop Image Example into the survey to see and interact with a pre-built Smart Loop table.
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Read more about the aytm Logic Guide here

 

 

Building a Smart Loop 

The columns in the Smart Loop represent variables you can add to your survey. When you add a new Smart Loop to your survey, the default has [variable_1], and [variable_2] populated.

  1. Click the + button to the right of the table to add up to 50 variables - text, video, or image - per Smart Loop.
  2. Click into the [variable_#] default text to give the variable a unique name. This name will act as a reference for that particular variable in the rest of your Smart Loop. Hover in the white space of a variable column and click the x to delete the column.
  3. Populate the table with your content; paste multi-line text into a column to create as many runs as there are copied lines, or click the + Add button below the last run to add up to 200 runs to a Smart Loop.
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Assigning Runs

Think of runs as monadic legs of your survey, if you have 4 concepts to test, you would have 4 runs in a Smart Loop. Runs are expressed by each row in the table. Each run (row) should contain a single concept, for example, Concept A image, Concept A brand name, and Concept A logo, should be all in the same run (row). 

  1. Click the Show drop-down to select how many runs each respondent evaluates.
    Note: Select All runs/respondent to ensure that, if you add runs later, respondents will still see all concepts.

This is the equation to calculate how many respondents will go through each run.

[total N] * [# of runs/respondents] / [# runs]
Example: [N400] * [max 2] / [4 concepts] = ~200 respondents/run
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Note: this is assuming there is no logic (e.g.: show/hide if) within the nodes. Conditional logic that restricts who can see questions or sets of questions could impact distribution.

 

 

Advanced Settings

  1. Click on the gear icon at the top right to open up the advanced settings interface.
  2. Click the drop-down next to Assign runs to toggle between Evenly and Randomly. The default, Evenly, works to provide the most even distribution of respondents between runs (groups of questions), while Randomly works to reduce order bias.
    Note: When All Runs is selected, an additional option, Static Order, appears under the Assign runs drop-down. This allows you to present all questions in the order they're programmed, to all respondents.
  3. Click into the Balance by text box to customize the group logic, and distribute respondents within runs proportionately to a specific trait or on answers to a previous question.
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Syntax for Balancing

When balancing by traits, trait characteristics must be in quotation marks (single or double).

Example - balancing by gender

Programming syntax:

 [Group Q2-4 and Q5-7 and Q8-10 balance gender = “f”, gender = “m” max 1]

Example - balancing by answer selections (Q5a8, Q5a9, Q4a2) among these groups [Group Q6-9 and Q10-13 and Q14-17].

Programming syntax:

 [Group Q6-9 and Q10-13 and Q14-17 balance Q5a8, Q5a9, Q4a2]

When adding balancing parameters to Group logic (including within Smart Loops), you are specifying that the distribution of respondents matching that criteria are balanced evenly across nodes (e.g., ~33% of females will be assigned to each of Q2-4, Q5-7, and Q8-10). Any between respondent segment balancing needs to be specified at the survey level through the Target Market page for traits or custom quotas for question responses.

Please note all of these settings are based on the total number of respondents requested, runs per respondent and the number of runs. If you have an conditional logic (e.g.: show/hide if) within the question sets or nodes this will impact the distribution. 

 

 

Programming your Question Set

  1. Click the Add a question to the Smart Loop to open the New Question menu, and add a question to the Smart Loop. Questions that are included in the Smart Loop are all connected by the blue bar on the left.
  2. Use the variables in the Smart Loop table to reference specific data points to replace in each run.
    Note: Unlike other aytm Logic, these variable references are case sensitive.

Note: If you do not include references to your variables in the Smart Loop questions, you will not be able to launch your survey.
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Converting to regular questions

To view the logic used to program the Smart Loop, or to customize the question sets, click the settings wheel to open the Advanced settings, and then click Convert into regular questions; questions will appear in the master question set with all runs listed sequentially.

If you're simply checking the logic, click the Undo button to convert the questions back into a Smart Loop.
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Additional Smart Loop Logic

  1. Reference variables in questions using the [variable_#] defaults, or the case-sensitive custom references.
  2. Type :x inside the bracket after an image variable name to expand an image, :s to allow respondents to scroll on an image, and :xs to expand and scroll.
    Ex: if the image variable text is [ad], reference logic [ad:x] will show the image expanded to respondents. Use the preview link directly above the question with image expand logic to confirm how it will appear to respondents.
  3. Use [run] in combination with conditional logic to customize question presentation.
    Ex: [show if [run]=1] to only show a question for the first run/concept.
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Additional Resources