What is Item Completion Rate?
Item completion rate is the percentage of respondents who answer a specific survey question (item). It helps you spot questions that cause drop‑off, confusion or deliberate skipping.
Item completion rate measures how many people who were presented with a particular question actually provided an answer. It’s usually expressed as a percentage: (number of respondents who answered the item) ÷ (number of respondents who were shown the item) × 100. Use the number of people who were presented the item as the denominator when your survey uses branching or mandatory/optional settings, because that gives an accurate picture of whether the question itself is being completed.
Usage example
You launched a parent feedback survey in five languages. Question 7 was shown to 450 participants and 360 answered it, so the item completion rate for Question 7 is 360 ÷ 450 = 80%. If the same question had 360 answers but 500 people started the survey, reporting 360 ÷ 500 = 72% would be misleading because 50 people never reached the question due to earlier skips.
Practical application
Why it matters: tracking item completion rate reveals which questions reduce response quality or participation. Low completion can indicate confusing wording, sensitive topics, poor mobile layout, or translation problems — critical issues for multilingual surveys. In Hearo you can use item completion data to: - Find questions with low completion across languages, then review and improve translations or phrasing. - Distinguish whether drop‑off is caused by survey flow (people not shown the item) or by the item itself. - Prioritise edits to questions that most affect response quality and participation, reducing the need for multiple translated drafts and improving inclusion for communities that use other languages.
FAQ
How is item completion rate different from overall survey completion rate?
Survey completion rate measures how many people finish the entire survey. Item completion rate looks at one question at a time. A survey can have a high overall completion rate but still include individual questions with low item completion, which signals problems with those specific items.
Which denominator should I use — people who started the survey or people who were shown the question?
Use the number of people who were shown the question (presented) as the denominator, especially when your survey uses branching or conditional logic. This isolates whether respondents chose to skip the question or left it unanswered after seeing it, instead of being excluded by earlier logic.
What counts as a low item completion rate?
There’s no universal threshold — acceptable rates depend on question type and context. Fact or required questions should be near 95–100%, while sensitive or optional open‑text items commonly have lower rates. Look for items that perform substantially worse than similar questions or that vary widely across languages — those deserve review.
How can I improve item completion for multilingual audiences?
Check translations and cultural appropriateness, simplify wording, make the question optional if it feels intrusive, reduce on‑screen complexity for mobile users, and use Hearo’s participant feedback flags to capture wording problems. Then update the source text and apply improved translations so the fix scales across languages.