How to make a poll in Google Forms

Whether you need to know your office mates’ preferred pizza toppings or their thoughts on a given project, an online poll is a great way to find out. Unlike surveys (which tend to be a little broader) a poll asks a group of people their opinion on a specific topic.

Polls are an efficient way to read a room and make group decisions based on preferences. If you’re looking to whip one up quickly, you’ll likely reach for Google Forms. It’s a free, easy-to-use form builder available to anyone with a Google account.

Does Google have a polling feature?

In short…kind of.

Before November 1st, 2022, you could have used Google Surveys to make your poll. But since that feature has now gone with the wind, Google users are forced to find other avenues. You can create a poll in real-time during a Google Meet, or you can use a Google Form.

Google Forms isn’t intended to be a polling tool. When you build a poll on Google Forms, you’re essentially just building a very short form. There’s no dedicated polling template, no polling fields, and no real stylistic difference between a poll, a survey, and a form.

🤯 New to Google Forms? Check out our ultimate guide to Google Forms to become a pro in no time.

How to Make a Poll in Google Forms in 5 steps

Google Forms is popular, but with no customer support to speak of, it’s easy to get stuck. That’s why we’ve compiled this step-by-step tutorial to teach you how to create a poll on Google Forms.

We’ll walk you through the process, outline some potential challenges, and offer a much more professional solution. Let’s get started.

1. Open a new blank form

Navigate to Google Forms and open a blank new form. You could pick from one of their templates, but there are no dedicated poll or survey templates to choose from.

Label your form accordingly and add any additional information in the description. In this case, we’ll be making a poll to see how an office feels about its current meeting policies.

2. Add your poll questions

When you start a new form, there should be a blank field open by default. Go ahead and adjust this field to create your first poll question.

While you can add multiple questions to your poll, it’s best to keep them as short and focused as possible. The longer your poll gets, the more you risk losing respondents to survey fatigue.

Add each question as its own field. For our example, we’ll stick to three questions:

• Do you feel satisfied with the number of meetings you currently attend?
• Do you prefer in-person or virtual meetings?
• Do you think we should adopt an office-wide no-meeting Friday policy?

3. Add answer options

Navigate to your first question and select the type of answer you’d like from the dropdown menu. When choosing your question types, keep in mind that polls are most effective when they’re simple, easy to fill out, and straight to the point. Nobody wants to sift through an endless list of questions.

To boost your completion rates, it’s best to use one-click answer types, like a multiple-choice question or a linear scale. (You can jerry-rig a ranked choice question using a multiple-choice grid, but it’s not exactly easy.)

Try to be as clear as possible when creating your poll answers. Instead of just giving yes and no as options, make the sentiment clear so respondents don’t get confused.

If you’d like to, you can add an “other” answer option and have respondents type out more specific replies. This can be helpful if you are open to more nuanced feedback. If you want responses that fall neatly into categories and can be easily mapped on a graph, it might not be the best call.

4. Adjust your sharing settings

Once you’ve completed your poll questions, it’s time to get them ready for sharing. If you want to ensure that each question in your poll is answered, toggle on the required switch at the bottom of each question.

Respondents may feel comfortable sharing their opinions when they know that the poll is anonymous and can’t be traced back to their name or email address. If you’d like to do this in your Google Poll, head to the settings tab and untoggle collect email addresses.

While in the settings tab, you can decide whether you’d like to restrict access to your form only to people within your organisation and if you’d like to allow response editing.

To get an accurate read of the room, it’s a good idea to toggle on Limit to 1 response. This will ensure that each person can only vote once.

5. Share your poll

Your poll is made, form settings are confirmed, and it’s time for the most important part: gathering the data.

Click the purple send button to share your poll. You can copy the shareable link to your poll, post it on social media, or send it out via email.

For a use case like this one, sending an email is likely the most efficient method. You can include any reminders you need in the subject and body of the email, and ask people to respond to the form before it closes.

When it comes time to review your form responses, just jump back into Google Forms and navigate to the responses tab. From here you can connect your form with Google Sheets, or view form responses as graphs and charts.

Make polls that have beauty and brains

Google Forms does the trick for making basic polls and surveys. It’s simple, easy to use, and free. But as an entry-level tool, it has its fair share of limitations.

Google Forms offers very basic data analysis. You can view who answered your form and check out a handful of simple graphs. You can’t access partial submissions, though, which can skew your overall poll results.

There are also virtually no supported integrations outside of the G-suite. So if you want to use an online tool like Hotjar or SegMetrics, you’ll need to transfer your form data manually.

And let’s face it: anything built on Google Forms screams “this was built on Google Forms.” The customisation options are pretty limited. You can add a header image and get rid of some of that purple, but that’s about it.

Hard as you might try, you’ll end up with a poll that looks like just about every other poll ever made on Google Forms. If you need to create more advanced, branded polls, you’ll need something a little more powerful than Google Forms.

Enter: Paperform. With our digital suite of tools, you can create polls that work great, integrate with all your favourite apps, and look beautiful doing it. Our intuitive, doc-style editor and advanced features make it easy to do.

Click anywhere in your form to add text, images, video, or any of our 25+ field types, including file upload, e-signature, and even pricing. You can create polls that are simple and easy to fill out without being limited to multiple-choice questions alone.

We have tons of one-click options for gathering data. Toss in a scale question to gauge interest in a new product release, or a rating question to see how last year's products compared to this year's. We also have dedicated ranking fields and matrix questions, which allow users to answer several multiple-choice questions at once.

All Paperform creations are mobile-optimised, so your poll always looks its best. Matrix questions are automatically converted to multiple choice when accessed on a smartphone, and lengthier form questions are made readable. You can use guided mode to automatically display one question at a time, too.

Want to take your poll to the next level? Add some conditional logic to personalise the response process. With just a few conditions in place, you can create a poll that adapts in real-time based on the answers it’s given.

Paperform offers robust built-in data analysis so you can make the most of your form results. To access them, just hop into the editor and click on your results. You'll get access to helpful visualisations of your data and all the response stats you might need, including partial submissions and completion rates.