Bucket.io

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Bucket.io Survey Builder by Ryan Levesque

The Bucket.io survey tool (also called Bucket IO) is the digital implementation of the “Ask Method” by Ryan Levesque.

(Back story – the ‘Ask Method’ is pretty cool… it shows how to use quizzes to get potential customers to tell you what they really want/need – so you can follow up with the right marketing messages.)

If you want to implement all the steps from the “Ask Method”, Bucket.io will have you covered. It follows Ryan Levesque’s suggestions step by step and allows you to build an automatic lead qualification funnel using surveys.

(Update: March 1, 2022 – it looks like Bucket.io is no longer a true SaaS service; we’ve heard from several community members that Ryan Levesque is offering access to it as part of his ASK Method Masterclass. All of his paid classes and courses are showing ‘Coming soon’ or ‘No classes offered’ – so it’s possible Ryan isn’t offering these services anymore.)

Now Bucket.io is not an online quiz maker in a classic sense. But if your main goal from quiz building is lead generation, their tool is certainly worth a look.

Bucket.io is designed around powerful, flexible marketing funnels and buckets. You can create a series of surveys to qualify leads into buckets (hence the name) – that you can then automatically send custom, personalized offers to each group.

However, Bucket.io is not for beginners or even intermediate users – the tools are highly complex and come with a myriad of options for professional marketers.

They are absolutely not designed for audience engagement like Involve.me and Riddle. You can see this in their limited range of content types, formatting and customization, plus the lack of social sharing integrations like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

We recommend you be cautious about trying Bucket.io. It does not appear they are GDPR-compliant, and there are questions if Bucket 2.0 is still being actively supported or developed.

Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Bucket.io:

• Range of quiz formats: ★★☆☆☆
• Customization options: ★★☆☆☆
• Lead generation: ★★★★★
• Data privacy: ★☆☆☆☆
• Pricing: ★★☆☆☆
• Overall: ★★☆☆☆

Pricing: Bucket.io is expensive (!!)

There are no two ways around it. Bucket.io is seriously pricey.

• Pricing starts at $199 per month (and they also cheekily require a $2,000 set up charge).
• No free trial to test it out pre-purchase – which is pretty strange, considering how expensive it is.
• Also odd, none of their plans give you unlimited numbers of leads or quiz views (we love Riddle’s approach to pricing).
• Even their top plan has a cap of 150,000 leads a month – which is very easy to blow through for bigger companies.

What quiz types?

• Survey
• Personality tests
• Lead generation forms

• Perfect implementation of the ‘Ask method’
• Many options for data integrations and customization
• Ideal if your main goals is collecting leads through surveys

• Limited to surveys and personality tests – no other interactive formats
• Very complicated to set up
• Surveys cannot be embedded on your website
• Very expensive and no free trial option

Bucket.io: all @ leads / zero @ engagement

Bucket.io has a crystal clear focus – create surveys or personality tests that help you to qualify leads and put them into lead buckets.

The platform is centered around survey funnels and buckets using lead qualification – Bucket.io’s software is not built to engage or entertain your site’s visitors.

• You start out with creating a ‘discovery survey’.
• The survey can either be full page or opened after a button click.

Now – this is where we already got confused while testing.

Most other tools let you create content and then allow you to embed the content on your website using some variation of an iFrame code. Bucket only lets you run the surveys from their domain – which seems like a big limiting factor.

They do offer a list of domains you can choose from – Bucket.io only allows you to connect your own domain in one of their higher-priced packages.

But that seems a bit cumbersome – you would have difficulties with this approach if you’re part of a larger company website – IT security types are very hesitant to connect websites to their domains.

We initially created examples of the full page or button method below – so you could see them in action, but when our trial expired, the examples stopped working.

Quiz creation process

After creating your entry survey, the next step is to further segment the leads you’ve collected by sending them through a segmentation funnel.

What’s a segment quiz funnel?

This is just another survey to further qualify the leads collected. For example, imagine you asked your site visitors if they would rather vacation in the mountains or on a beach. (Editorial note: We’re big beach geeks planning our own holidays – so this is what came to mind for our example.)

This survey quiz now has two segments.

You would now send each of the two groups a separate segmentation survey. For the beach lovers, you could now go into more detail – finding out if they prefer ocean beaches or if a sandy lakefront would do.

You could then use the results of this more detailed, targeted survey and create very specific audiences that you can send follow-up offers around their beach holiday preferences.

And sure, you can add further segmentation surveys to get very specific and thus make sure that your offers match exactly what your prospective customers desire.

The idea behind the ‘Ask Method’ is that in the long run, this method should dramatically increase your sales – as you’re sending the right messages to the right users, using information they provided themselves. If you want to read more about the ask method and what is behind it, check out this blog post on the ‘Ask Method’.

Bucket.io – the builder interface

Bucket.io’s interface lets you create surveys and a simple form of personality tests via drag and drop. You choose the type of content you want to add to your survey from:

• Welcome page
• Short text
• Long text
• Radio button
• Checkbox
• Contact info (a lead form)
• Thank you page

When adding a question, you can mark it as the “single most important question” and use that to qualify your leads later on in the process. The single most important question should also be the first question you ask – just in case your readers choose to not finish the survey.

Bucket.io is tightly integrated with Zapier.com and thus allows you to add Zapier tags to your questions – so you can automatically synchronize with any email marketing software.

Zapier.com is a very cool web service that allows you to easily connect multiple tools and move data between them – no coding required.

For example, once you collect a lead in a quiz or survey, you might want to send that lead to salesforce.com or to aWeber. To do that, you simply hook up your quiz tool and your lead collection tool in Zapier – then tell Zapier how to map the data from one tool to the other.

Now every time your quiz collects a lead, it will send it on to Zapier – and Zapier will take care of sending it on to your lead tool.

There are hundreds of apps that work with Zapier and you can write pretty cool automation tasks with their interface.

Customization Options

With Bucket.io’s focus on lead generation, the design options are somewhat limited. You can choose your own footer text, pick from a small list of fonts and set a background image or background color, as well as define the overall color scheme for your survey.

This should be sufficient for many people, but if you are running a large corporate site, you will miss the option to set your own corporate font or upload your own logo.

At the moment, you can only hide the bucket.io logo – and not upload your own logo to the survey.

Since the Bucket surveys always run from one of the Bucket domains and cannot be embedded into your website, a complete white-label option is not possible. That’s a big turn-off for brands, agencies, and publishers.

However, Bucket.io really shines in terms of the customization options they offer around user tracking and lead generation.

You can:

• Use Bucket.io’s Zapier app to connect to 3,000 tools like Klaviyo and Salesforce – no coding required.
• Place your own Facebook pixel and track questions and/or folks who reach the “thank you” page
• Enter your own code for tracking or SEO purposes (necessary as the survey will not run on your own site)
• Add variables to each answer option for further processing (the variables will be passed on to zapier for example)
• Integrate Google Analytics. This is important as the survey will not run on your site. You would thus need to add your tracking to whatever domain your survey will run on.
• Capture UTM variables and append them to the leads. A very nice feature if you drive paid traffic to your survey.

The options for integration and tracking are quite extensive and should satisfy most marketing needs.

Many of the presented options, however, are only necessary as the survey cannot be embedded into your website.

For example, you would not need to enter your own header code, if the survey would simply run inside a page on your site. Other options like the Facebook pixel or the ability to generate Google Analytics events are very useful and implemented nicely for advanced marketers.

Personality test: 5/10

Bucket.io has a hidden feature that allows you to create personality tests, where you link responses to personality types. The personality type that gets the most responses throughout the test “wins”.

This is one of our biggest frustrations with Bucket.io.

It’s a great feature – but took us a while to figure out how this is done in Bucket.io. It turns out this option is only available when you create segmentation funnels – not when creating entry surveys.

To create a personality test, you first need to create at least two outcomes. The outcome is the result for the test and you can either build the result page with their internal tool or link to an external page.

Next, create and save the question. Mouse over the question title to see a menu appear where you can click on the filter icon to map the outcome:

If we weren’t writing a review, we would have given up finding this feature as it took us half an hour to finally figure out how to map the outcomes. They could not have done this in a less obvious way. We also found their features for branching logic and cloning questions, which is kind of cool – but more on that later.

The mapping itself happens in a fairly simple interface – you can drag an arrow from an answer option to one of the outcomes you previously created. There is no way to assign a weight when mapping outcomes around nuanced answers.

It is a straight 1:1 relationship, which will make it hard to create serious psychological personality tests with this tool, but as we mentioned – that is not the focus of bucket.io.

You have to repeat this process for each question to finish the mapping.

Branching Logic

Their branching logic is an impressive feature, which allows you to ask a question then direct test or survey takers to a specific follow up question based on how they answered.

This is a powerful tool if you are trying to build something like a ‘choose your own adventure / interactive story type’ quiz – where the user only sees the questions that most apply to them.

We would recommend staying away from this feature when building a personality test – it will mess up your test’s scoring and personality results if you have readers skip questions.

Data protection and Privacy

Bucket.io’s approach to run all surveys and store all personalized customer data from their own servers raises all sorts of privacy issues for European customers.

While we are big fans of the concept behind Bucket.io’s lead generation/survey tool – the lack of information about how and why they collect your audience’s data is very worrying.

This is a key section of the privacy policy and GDPR-statement from Bucket.io (we added the bold/underlining):

‘In using the Services, you may be providing to New Edge or uploading to your Account information regarding the activities, preferences, questionnaires, surveys, and/or information (the “Client User Data”) on your customers or other third parties (collectively, the “Customers”). Such Client User Data may include or be linked to Personal Information of such Customer (“Customer Personal Information”) and/or to non-personally identifiable information of such Customer including IP address, zip codes, browser type, and geo-location. Client User Data is stored on New Edge’s web servers and databases (including those hosted on third-party servers on behalf of New Edge) for use in providing the Services.’

So many things to tackle here – here’s a short sample:

1. IP addresses are collected: despite what Bucket.io says, IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information according to the GDPR. If you use Bucket.io for European users, you could be liable – no matter where your business is located in the world.
2. Non-EU data storage: Bucket.io is owned by New Edge – a company based in Texas in the USA. That almost certainly means that any leads and personal information you collect for European visitors will leave the EU to be stored in the USA. That’s a big, big no-no.
3. No info about cookies and trackers: We couldn’t analyze their use of trackers, Google Analytics, cookies, and other services – but would be very, very cautious about using Bucket.io unless you’re 100% focused on US traffic.

Why?

Based on the strict EU privacy laws, you need explicit permission from your site visitors to store their data on servers outside of the EU. We didn’t see that when evaluating the Bucket.io services.

As of 2020, the US/EU Privacy Shield is no longer valid – so you could be facing huge fines (Amazon got fined $877 million for improper cookie consent – and WhatsApp was hit for $255 million).

Bucket.io – overall assessment

Bucket.io has done a good job at creating a highly customizable lead generation tool.

Ryan Levesque’s quiz funnel strategy is based on getting potential customers to answer a series of surveys. After that, you will be able to segment leads and send the right message to the right person at the right time.

The interface is complicated – but well laid out, with the exception of the hidden personality test and branching logic options.

We used to recommend this quiz maker for advanced marketers that were comfortable with limited customization options (such as branding) and the security/data protection issues of hosting your content on another company’s servers.

But checking back on Bucket.io’s site – as of the end of January, 2022, Bucket.io 2.0 still hasn’t launched to the public.

Instead, you just see this ‘private invitation-only’ banner – leading to an out-of-date webinar announcement.

We recommend you be very cautious about signing up – it’s not clear if Bucket.io’s survey funnel software is still being actively developed or supported.

And if you are looking for both leads and the ability to engage/entertain your audience, we’d recommend you keep looking at other more dedicated quiz makers.

Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Bucket.io:

• Range of quiz formats: ★★☆☆☆
• Customization options: ★★☆☆☆
• Lead generation: ★★★★★
• Data privacy: ★☆☆☆☆
• Pricing: ★★☆☆☆
• Overall: ★★☆☆☆