Report element breakout

One of the most important insights a survey report can provide is to show differences in your population.

To see those differences, you need to be able to compare different samples, side by side for the same question. Adding a breakout will create groups in your report element, based on a second data source. Breakouts let you do some interesting things:

  • compare the NPS scores for different store locations
  • compare the satisfaction score of employees by department, often with a benchmark for the whole company
  • Breakout purchase intent by age category

To create a breakout, you start by adding an element such as a bar chart or gauge for a question, e.g. a satisfaction question or NPS. Then add a breakout as a second data source, e.g. 'locations', 'gender', 'dept', etc. The system will create a bar or gauge for each item in the second 'breakout' data source.

Watch the following video to see a demo of how to create a breakout element and add it to a survey.

Adding a breakout to an element

  1. Go to your survey report (or create new one).
  2. Select the element you wish to break out (or add a new element first).
  3. In the properties pane, select the Data tab.

  4. Select Breakout from the Add dropdown.

  5. Select the breakout source (question or metadata).

    Adding a breakout.

Breakout before:

Breakout before.

Breakout after:

Breakout after.

Tip: If you are not getting the result you want, you can reverse the order and create an element based on the data source you first used as a breakout and then set the other main data source as the breakout. This will reverse the visualization and sometimes gives a better result.

Breakout or breakdown?

The terms breakout and breakdown are often used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings.

  • Breakout — Take a data source and break it out by another data source. A breakout always has more than one data source.
  • Breakdown — Take one data source and break it down into its options. For instance, take a satisfaction score and instead of showing its average, show the response percentages for each answer option.

Sometimes, the two are combined. For instance, if you ask respondents about their last vacation, applying a breakdown in a bar chart, would produce a bar for each answer option, showing the percentage of respondents that gave that answer.

Adding a breakout based on gender, would produce two charts next to each other, so that you can easily compare the two sets of data

Breakout of breakdown.

Removing a breakout

  1. Select the element from which you want to remove the breakout.
  2. In the properties pane, select the Data tab.
  3. Click on the trash can next to the data source that says 'Breakout'.