Telling a story with data requires a different way of thinking. You need an analytical mindset to pull meaning from the data, as well as a content marketer’s lens to know what’s actually interesting. 

Before you can begin to analyze your marketing data, there’s some basic data management you’ll need to do to be able to get interesting, shareable insights from your survey data. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through some of the foundational data management you’ll want to do before you start analyzing your data, how to manage your data in Flowerplot, and some more advanced data management you may end up using, depending on your dataset.

Review your survey data for accuracy

After you set up a new project in Flowerplot, go to Manage Data. Review each question and make sure that: 

• The question matches the question type from your survey

• The question is formatted correctly 

• All of your survey questions have imported

  
  

If you notice any errors or want to update the question, click the three dots to the right of the question and choose “Edit data”.

From here, you can edit the question text or response text. 

Hide questions

While managing your data, you can choose to hide questions from your survey that you won’t need for analysis. 

Click “Edit data” and select “Hide” to hide that question from appearing when you’re in Analysis and Design. 

Move a question to demographics

When you run a survey, some questions will be demographic questions, like country, age, or income level. These can be used for cross-tabs or to show a snapshot of who you surveyed. 

Click “Edit data” and select “Move to demographics” to move a question to the demographic section of your survey questions.

Group responses and create variants

Let’s say you run a survey and ask which country each respondent is from. But during analysis, you want to look at the data by region. 

You can combine the countries within a certain region, then analyze them as a group. These groupings make stronger cross-tabs, allow you to more easily find patterns in your data, and help you create more impactful data visualizations.

To group responses, click “Edit data” and choose each response you want to group together. 

Then, click “Create group” and name your new group. 

Once you’ve created all the groups you want for that question, you can either click “Save” to override the initial question with your new groupings, or “Save as variant” to create a new version of the question with your new groupings.

Some common groupings you may want to create are:

• Countries > Regions

• Ages > Generations

• Employee count/ARR > Company sizes

• Role > Managers vs. leaders

Set up ranked questions

When you import a ranked question into Flowerplot, you need to set how you asked that ranked question in your survey. Go to the ranked question and select “Edit data”.

Then, choose “Ranking depth” to select which type of ranked question you asked in your survey. This allows Flowerplot to accurately calculate your ranked question in analysis.

Need help managing your survey data or creating a new project? Reach out to support at accounts@flowerplot.com.