Want to discover your contacts’ true preferences?
With the Ranking question, you can ask them to order multiple options by importance or preference, so it's a simple way to understand what really matters and in what order.
In this article, you’ll learn what the Ranking question is, when to use it, how to set it up in magnews, and how to read its results in the report.
What is the Ranking question
The Ranking question lets you display a list of options that contacts should reorder based on their own priorities. Each position in the list generates a score: the more often an option is ranked at the top, the higher its final score and position in the overall ranking.
This type of question helps you get more detailed insights than a single-choice question. It doesn’t just show what people like, it shows how much they like it compared to everything else.
When to use it
Use the Ranking question when you want to collect data on priorities, preferences, or decision-making criteria.
For example, if you’re a Retail or eCommerce brand and you want to understand what drives your customers to purchase, you can ask them to rank the factors that influence their buying decisions, offering options such as price, quality, delivery time, easy returns, sustainability or loyalty programs.
Then, by analyzing the report, you’ll see which aspects are most or least appreciated and tailor your communications accordingly.
Or, if you work in a B2B company and want to identify which aspects matter most to your clients when evaluating a partnership, you can ask them to prioritize supplier selection criteria such as reliability, technical expertise, response time, flexibility, price, or post-sale support.
The responses will help you highlight the most valued strengths in your marketing messages and build stronger relationships with your clients.
What the contact sees
When the contact views the question, they’ll see a list of sortable options and can move the items to define their own order either by dragging and dropping or by using the arrow controls.
At first, the options don’t show any position numbers; these appear only after the first click or move, when the person starts actually reordering the list.
This behavior allows magnews to detect who has actively interacted with the question versus who has only viewed it without submitting preferences.
How to create a Ranking question
- If you haven’t already, create a new survey landing page and add the Ranking question by selecting it or dragging it from the right-hand panel
- Click the question to open the settings panel on the right
- Customize the question text and edit the options to be ranked in the General tab
- Scroll through the other tabs to adjust additional settings such as style or visibility conditions
- Click the Save button
- If your survey includes multiple questions, distribute them across one or more pages to manage any branching logic
- Customize the thank-you page
- Publish the landing page.
Beyond that limit, the experience for respondents becomes slower and less intuitive, which may result in fewer and less accurate answers. Focus on a few truly relevant options: your survey will be easier to complete, and the results will be clearer and more reliable.
View results in the report
You can review the results from the landing page report linked to the survey by clicking the Report button in: Journey Lab > Journey list > [Journey name] > [Landing page name].
The Ranking question results appear inside a dedicated card, where you can choose among three different display modes: summary, detailed, and table.
Summary view
This is the default view: it shows all options with their corresponding ranking positions.
Hover over any option to see its average score and how many times it was ranked in each position.
The score indicates how often an option was placed at the top of the list. The higher the score, the more frequently that option was ranked among the top positions. For example:
- Score 100%: always ranked 1st
- Score 0%: always ranked last
Detailed view
As in the summary report, you’ll find the same information here, but with a richer visual representation: colors highlight each individual ranking vote received.
For instance, in this example, “Price” was the option most frequently ranked first (blue) and was never placed last, as shown by the absence of a red bar in its row.
Table view
This view presents all information in a tabular format and allows you to export the report data for further analysis or broader comparison.