How to create an exit-intent mobile pop-up survey for valuable customer insights

Exit-intent surveys are crucial for understanding why potential customers leave your site without making a purchase. Direct customer feedback can reveal hidden customer experience issues, like hard-to-navigate menus or frustrating checkout flows that drive up bounce rates and negatively affect your conversions.

But with more than half of all web traffic worldwide coming from mobile devices, you need to be mindful of how and where your exit-intent survey pop-ups appear, or your proactive attempts to improve the customer journey and experience could end up hurting it instead.

Read on to learn why you need to take a different approach with exit-intent surveys on mobile—and how to use them to get valuable data that leads to impactful, growth-driving changes.

3 ways exit-intent pop-ups are different on mobile (and what you need to do about it)

To create effective mobile exit-intent surveys, you need to focus on the unique behaviors of mobile users and adapt your exit-intent strategies accordingly. 

Here’s how exit-intent differs by device:

1. The exit-intent triggers are different

On desktop, exit-intent surveys are usually triggered by mouse movement. For example, moving your cursor to the ‘X’ button to close your tab or browser will trigger an exit-intent popup (if set).

But mobile browsers typically don’t have cursors and you can’t rely on cursor movements to trigger an exit-intent event. 

So, what does trigger exit intent on mobile? Common signs that mobile users are about to (literally and metaphorically) bounce include:

• Scrolling up: in many mobile browsers, the URL bar disappears as you scroll down. Users need to quickly scroll up to bring it back, so this action can signify that they’re about to type in a new URL and exit

• Pressing the back button: users can also use the back button to return to a previous web page, such as a search engine results page or a referral link

• A period of idle time: a certain amount of time on your site without taking any actions can suggest that you’ve lost your user’s attention—which may lead to them leaving

However, these signals don’t always indicate a user is leaving. And there’s a chance you could interrupt someone’s visit with an exit-intent survey when they aren’t actually leaving your site. Although this may only be a minor annoyance, it can still negatively impact your site’s UX. 

One way around this? Use Contentsquare Heatmaps. 

Heatmaps give you visual representations of where users tap, click, scroll, and move. Filter heatmaps by device to spot common exit-intent signals for mobile users, and use these behaviors to trigger mobile exit-intent surveys with your chosen mobile-friendly exit-intent survey tool.

By using these insights, you can fine-tune your exit-intent triggers and ensure they’re more accurately aligned with users who are genuinely leaving your site.

Need to get even more granular? The Heatmaps interface gives you convenient, at-a-glance insights right from one place, like 

• The page’s average user feedback score

• Rage clicks (areas where users click and click and click out of frustration)

• U-turns (when users return to a previous URL within seven seconds of landing on your page)

For even more context, jump straight from your heatmaps to associated session playbacks called session replays to watch how real users navigate your site, so you have a better understanding of bounced visits. 

2. The user experience is different

Desktop users are on a big screen with a lot of real estate. This gives you multiple website exit survey formats to choose from: in-context popover surveys, eye-catching full screen surveys, and subtle button or embedded surveys. 

On the flip side, mobile design has its own set of specific considerations: 

• Mobile screens are small, which means that full screen pop-ups take up a greater percentage of them—and are more intrusive (i.e. annoying)

• It can be trickier on mobile to find the right place to tap to close a pop-up survey, which not only leads to user frustration and inaccessibility, but also negatively affects your UX and your search rankings

• Desktop users have a full keyboard for typing up long-form survey responses, whereas mobile users will be tap-tap-tapping on a touchscreen

💡 Pro tip: tailor your survey format and response types to your device.

For example, while open-ended questions (questions that cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’) are important for gathering insights, they require more effort to respond to. This can be especially off-putting for mobile users—and may affect your response rates.

So, when structuring your survey for mobile users, consider a mix of quantitative, closed-ended questions and qualitative, open-ended questions to ensure you get the right balance of responses.

3. The user behavior is different

Mobile users may be browsing from anywhere, at any time—on the bus, in a waiting room, or under the covers at 3 am. So whether or not they’re actually ‘on-the-go’, you want to create a lightweight, low-effort experience that matches their device type.

It’s also worth remembering that conversion rates and abandonment rates differ between mobile and desktop. 

According to research from Dynamic Yield, conversion rates for desktop were 4.44% while mobile was slightly lower at 3.05%. Dynamic Yield also found the average mobile shopping cart abandonment rate is 76.24% (versus 66.46% on desktop).

So, bear in mind that exits on mobile may be expected—for example, users may browse on mobile but return later to make a purchase on desktop. 

In this case, you need to ask yourself: “What are they looking for from their mobile experience, and how can we provide it?” 

For an ecommerce site, this could mean implementing a wishlist on your mobile online store or app to make it easier for shoppers to convert via desktop when they’re ready.

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Product Analytics lets you view multi-session user journeys so you can see how users move through your funnel across different devices. Including where they exit on mobile and where they resume their session on desktop.

Pair this with our Session Replay tool to understand and empathize with real user behavior and see how it differs on desktop vs. mobile. Quickly spot mobile usability issues that impact UX or conversion rates, and discover what people really want when they’re on different devices.

5 tools to create a mobile-friendly exit-intent survey

The five tools below let you set up an exit pop-up on mobile pages using common exit triggers:

1. OptinMonster: OptinMonster’s library of mobile-optimized templates makes setting up a mobile exit-intent survey a breeze. Users can choose from different display rules to set an exit-intent trigger for pop-ups—including the two most common, scrolling up and hitting the back button.

2. Qualtrics: this popular tool offers the ability to build an exit-intent survey for mobile website visitors that asks them one question: for their email or their phone number. Once you have their contact information, you can set up an automation that sends an in-depth survey via email or SMS where you can collect even more information about their visit. This strategy doesn’t give you in-the-moment feedback, but it may be less invasive than other mobile surveys. 

3. Wisepops: Wisepops’ pop-up software includes two crucial mobile exit-intent triggers: pressing the back button and scrolling up. Once you’ve created an account, the exit option can be activated in one click, making this one of the most user-friendly tools on our list.

4. Nextsale: this tool provides a wide range of mobile exit-intent triggers, including pressing the back button, time-based scroll, switching tabs, and idle timeout. Just add a new campaign from your Nextsale dashboard, toggle to ‘mobile device’, and select your triggers.

5. Picreel: the platform’s Popup Builder tool gives you multiple mobile exit-intent options, including overlay pop-ups, fullscreen pop-ups, and even gamified pop-ups. With Picreel, you can easily set up triggers like hitting the back button or home button, switching to another tab, scrolling up, or interacting with specific widgets on your page.

Once you've settled on your tool, here are a few things to consider when creating your pop-up:

• Put thought into which pages you want your survey to appear on. Where do your mobile visitors tend to stop exploring? These might be key landing pages, product pages, or your online store’s checkout page. And finding why people leave is crucial to improve the page.

• Share the responses with your team. Once responses to your mobile exit-intent survey start rolling in, set aside some time to analyze the results with your team and take action.

• Set up an exit-intent pop-up on desktop, too. Get insights from users leaving from any type of device so you can compare results and optimize accordingly. For desktop exit-intent pop-ups, there's no better tool than Contentsquare Surveys. Set up an exit-intent survey using templates, AI, or start from scratch. 

📖 Looking for inspiration? Check out some of our favorite exit-intent pop-up examples from real companies.

3 types of questions to ask users in your mobile exit-intent pop-up

Just like the format of your surveys should adapt between desktop and mobile, so should the types of questions you ask. Here are some suggestions to get you started.

1. Radio buttons, reactions, and rating scales

Radio buttons, reactions, and rating scales all give users a selection of responses to choose from to reduce the amount of effort needed to answer. 

• Radio buttons present users with a few options but only allow them to choose one. The option orders can be randomized to avoid bias.

• Reactions display a scale of five graphics with customizable text labels on either side of the scale

• Rating scales ask a custom question and allow users to select a number response from a given range (e.g. 1–7)

These approaches work especially well for quantitative questions with yes/no answers or numerical ratings, like these:

• Did you find what you were looking for today? Yes/No

• How would you rate your experience on our site? 😡 → 🤩

• How likely are you to return to this site? On a scale of 1–7

2. Checkboxes

Checkboxes provide survey respondents with a range of options and allow them to choose more than one. This is helpful when you don’t want to limit feedback to just one answer. You can also provide space for users to add comments if their answer isn’t represented.

Here’s an example of a question that could use checkboxes:

• Why are you leaving our site today? Select all that apply

  • Couldn’t find what I was looking for

  • Found it cheaper elsewhere

  • Not enough information provided

  • Other (please specify)

3. Short text answers

Short text answers provide a single-line text field for users to type their response, allowing for free-form answers. These are useful when you want to capture user feedback or customer insights that you may not have thought of.

Consider asking something like:

• How could we improve our mobile site? 

• What prevented you from buying these items today?

How to use the data from your mobile exit-intent survey

The data will start coming in after launching your mobile exit-intent popup.

So, how do you extract the most value from it?

Compare it with the data from your desktop exit-intent survey

Spot discrepancies between your desktop and mobile experiences (and corroborate your findings with replays) to find opportunities to optimize your mobile UX.

Follow up with mobile respondents for more in-depth insights

Send follow-up surveys via email so users can provide more detailed information at another time. Or go one step further and schedule user interviews to home in on valuable feedback.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare: Use Contentsquare Interviews to schedule and conduct video interviews with survey respondents. We handle everything from scheduling to recording and transcribing. All you need to do is show up, lead the interview, and share the insight with your team. 

Identify trends, make changes—and measure impact

As with any survey results, the magic happens when you listen to your users and address their feedback. Measure key metrics like conversion rate or customer satisfaction over time to see how your changes pay off.

Learn from your users with mobile exit-intent surveys 

Mobile exit-intent surveys help you understand the unique needs and perspectives of your users—but for them to be effective and garner the results you need, you have to get them right. 

By creating mobile-specific pop-up surveys that appeal to, rather than annoy, your users before they leave, you’ll gather valuable user insights to improve your mobile conversion rate.

FAQs about exit intent on mobile