Survey Distribution¶
!!! info "TL;DR" Publish a survey to get a shareable public link, send it however you like (email, Slack, social), or show it inside your product with an SDK trigger. You can also send it straight from Canviq to a CSV list of email addresses, no separate email tool required.
Publish and Share the Link¶
A survey collects no responses until it's published.
Publishing moves the survey from Draft to Published and reveals a public link:
Click Copy to grab it. (en is your locale segment; it matches whichever locale the visitor lands on.) From there, send it through whatever channel you already use: an email from your own inbox or email tool, a Slack message, a link in your app, a social post, or Canviq's own CSV-based email sender (see Email a Survey to a CSV List below).
Who Can Respond¶
The public link works for anyone, signed in or not:
- No login is required to answer.
- After submitting, an unidentified respondent sees an optional prompt to leave an email address, so you can follow up. Providing it is optional.
How Link Responses Count¶
Every completed answer counts as one response against your plan's monthly allowance, whichever channel it arrived through: the public link, an email invite, or the SDK. Billing shows the running total and warns you at 80%.
When you reach the limit, the link stops taking new answers until the next billing period. Visitors see a short note that the survey isn't taking answers right now, and are told nothing about your plan. Upgrade, or wait for the period to roll over, and the link starts collecting again on its own. Surveys someone opened but never submitted don't count.
Hourly Ceiling on a Link¶
Because a public link is public, each survey also has an hourly ceiling on what it will take in, counted across every visitor together rather than per visitor. There were already per-visitor limits; this one applies to the survey as a whole, so it doesn't change when answers arrive from many different places.
How much a single survey will accept per hour is a tenth of your plan's monthly allowance, with a floor of 25 and a cap of 500:
| Plan | Monthly allowance | Submit attempts per hour, per survey |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | 25 |
| Startup | 1,000 | 100 |
| Growth / trial | 5,000 | 500 |
| Scale | Unlimited | 500 |
Separately, one survey will accept up to 5,000 opened pages per hour. Opening a survey costs you nothing against your allowance, so that number is only there to bound how fast one link can be hammered.
A few things worth knowing:
- It counts submit attempts, not finished responses. A visitor who presses submit with a required question still blank spends one.
- A launch-day email blast can reach these numbers legitimately, particularly on Growth. If that happens, a respondent is asked to try again shortly and the hour clears on its own — nothing they typed is lost, since answers are saved as they go. Tell us if you hit it and we'll raise it.
- In-app responses collected through the SDK have their own separate limits and aren't affected.
This is an anti-abuse measure, not a plan quota, and it is one of two limits rather than a complete answer. It bounds how much any single survey can absorb per hour, which is what a per-visitor limit alone could never do. It does not by itself make a public link unburnable, and that cuts both ways:
- Someone determined, with a pool of addresses, can still spend a month's allowance over a number of hours.
- The ceiling can also be filled on purpose. On Free, where it sits at 25 an hour, a handful of addresses is enough to keep a survey's hour full and turn real respondents away until it clears. The number is deliberately low there because the alternative is worse: that same handful could otherwise spend the whole month in an afternoon, and a spent month doesn't clear by itself. An hour does.
Either way the signal is the same. Treat a survey link the way you'd treat any other public URL — if one starts taking traffic you can't account for, pause the survey and tell us. We can see when a survey's ceiling is being hit.
Pausing and Closing¶
A survey has four states: draft, published, paused, and archived.
- Pause stops new responses temporarily. The link still resolves, but visitors see "This survey is temporarily paused." Resume to start collecting again.
- Archive removes the survey from your active list and closes it for good. Visitors see "This survey has closed."
In-App Distribution via the SDK¶
If your product is wired up with the Canviq SDK, you can show a survey inside your app instead of (or in addition to) sharing the link. Configure how it appears under the survey's trigger settings:
Four trigger types are available:
| Trigger | Fires when... |
|---|---|
| Event | A behavioral event you track through the SDK occurs |
| Manual | Your code explicitly asks the SDK to check and show it |
| Scheduled | A time-based condition is met |
| Page View | The user visits a matching page |
Add a trigger, then enable or disable it without deleting it. See SDK Integration for how to wire the SDK into your product.
Email a Survey to a CSV List¶
Canviq can email the survey directly to a list you upload, with a personal link for each recipient. The survey must be published first, and the panel lives on its own admin page:
Upload Your List¶
Upload a CSV with these columns:
email(oremail_address): required.first_name(orfirstname): optional. When it's there, the invite uses it in the greeting.
A single upload can hold up to 2,000 rows. Before you can upload, you have to check a box confirming that everyone on the list agreed to hear from you and that you can show when they opted in. There's no way around that checkbox.
Sending¶
Once your list is on file, click Send. Each recipient gets their own link, and their response is matched back to their invite, so the panel shows you who has and hasn't answered yet.
A few rules govern how sending works:
- Daily ceiling: up to 500 emails per organization per rolling 24 hours. This is an anti-abuse limit, not a plan quota.
- No repeat invites: anyone already invited to this survey is skipped automatically. If everyone on your list already has an invite, or you've hit the daily ceiling, Send tells you there's nothing to send.
- Sender: invites arrive from "[Your Org] via Canviq" through
mail.canviq.app. Replies go straight to whoever clicked Send.
Unsubscribing¶
Every invite carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Once someone unsubscribes, they're permanently off that organization's future survey invites, with no way to bring them back onto the list. A bounced address or a spam complaint is suppressed the same way, automatically, so you don't have to track deliverability by hand.
Getting Better Response Rates¶
Start with a small batch of people who already know you before sending to a cold list. It warms up your sender reputation and gets a better response rate. Ask people to check their junk folder if the email doesn't show up, and include a first_name column so the greeting doesn't read like a mail merge.