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Show the right survey to the right customers

By Peter Coolen · 7 October 2026 · 6 min read

Most post-purchase surveys ask every customer the same thing. That is easy to set up, but it means a loyal customer on their tenth order gets the same question as someone who found you yesterday, and a wholesale buyer gets the question meant for shoppers.

The fix is to target your survey: decide who a question is for, and show it only to them. Below are the most common targeting mistakes, each with a bad and a better way to do it, and how to set it up.

How targeting works

In the app you create a survey group and put its ID in the Thank You page block. In the group you list audiences, each with its own survey. An audience is a set of conditions about the order or the customer:

• The buyer: language, country or Shopify market.
• The order: products, collections, order total, or whether a discount code was used.
• The customer: first order or returning customer, and customer tags.

An audience can require all of its conditions or any of them. The list is checked from the top, and the first audience that matches decides which survey the customer sees. Anyone who matches none of them gets the survey for everyone else, or no survey at all.

1. Orders with the Trail RunnerNew shoe survey
2. First orderHow did you hear about us?
3. Everyone elseWhy did you come back?

1. One survey for everyone

New and returning customers know different things. Only a new customer can tell you how they found you. Only a returning customer can tell you why they came back.

2. Asking about products they didn’t buy

Launching something new? A general question about your range gets general answers. Ask the people who actually bought it.

Use a collection instead of a product to cover a whole range, such as everything in “Gifts” or “New arrivals”.

3. Asking what a discount code already told you

If a customer used an influencer’s code, you already know where they came from. Asking again wastes their time, and their answer can make your attribution numbers look different from your code numbers.

4. Treating every customer the same

Wholesale buyers, staff and your most loyal fans each see your shop differently. Customer tags let you treat them that way, using the tags you already have in Shopify.

An audience with no survey is a simple way to leave a group out entirely. Put it at the top, so it wins before any other audience.

5. One market, one set of answers

Customers in a new country often find you in different ways: other social networks, other marketplaces, local press. A single answer list built for your home market misses those channels, and an English survey gets ignored by customers who don’t read English.

6. Ignoring the size of the order

A first small order and a big basket are different decisions. The order total lets you ask about the one you care about. It is compared in the currency the customer paid in.

7. A filler survey for everyone else

Once your audiences cover the customers you want to hear from, you don’t need a survey for the rest. A question you won’t act on only adds to survey fatigue.

Order matters

Because the first matching audience wins, put the most specific one at the top. Take a first-time customer who buys the Trail Runner. With “First order” on top, they get the attribution question, and the shoe survey only ever reaches returning customers. With the shoe audience on top, they get the shoe survey, and every other first order still gets the attribution question.

Not sure what to ask each group? See good and bad examples of post-purchase survey questions.

Written with AI, idea and final edit by Peter Coolen.