15 "How Did You Hear About Us?" Answer Options (and How to Use Them)

The hardest part of a "How did you hear about us?" survey isn't building it. It's deciding what goes in the dropdown. Too few options and everything funnels into "Other." Too many and people bail or click the first thing they see. This is a list of 15 strong how did you hear about us options, the rules for choosing the right subset for your store, and how to read the answers once they start landing.

A strong default answer list

If you sell DTC and you're not sure where to start, this list works. It covers the channels that actually drive purchases for most Shopify brands, and nothing here is dead weight.

1. Friend or family
2. Instagram
3. TikTok
4. Facebook
5. YouTube
6. Google search
7. Podcast
8. Influencer or creator
9. Email or text from you
10. Saw it in a store
11. Reddit or a forum
12. News article or blog
13. Pinterest
14. Event or pop-up
15. Other (please specify)

Notice that 15 is the menu, not the recommendation. You will almost never ship all fifteen. Pick the ones that match your business and drop the rest. The next section is how you decide.

The rules for choosing your options

A good attribution list is a deliberately edited list. Four rules get you most of the way there.

Rule 1: Only include channels you actually invest in

Every option should map to a decision you might make. If you've never spent a dollar or an hour on Pinterest, "Pinterest" doesn't belong on the list. It just adds noise and gives people a place to misremember.

Flip it the other way too. If you're spending on podcast ads, "Podcast" has to be there as its own line. Burying podcast inside "Other" means you can't see the channel you're paying for, which defeats the point.

Rule 2: Always include "Other" with a free-text box

This is non-negotiable. No matter how careful your list is, customers will surprise you. The free-text field on "Other" is where you find the channels you didn't know mattered yet: a new affiliate, a Substack mention, a Facebook group, a gift from someone else.

In OrderSurvey you build this with a single-select question for the main choices, then add a short-text question that only appears when someone picks "Other." That's conditional branching, and it keeps the survey one tap for everyone who fits a clean bucket.

Rule 3: Keep it under about 10 visible options

Long lists tank your data quality. People scan, not read, and a wall of 15 radio buttons gets the "click the top one" treatment. Aim for 6 to 9 visible options for most stores. If you feel the list creeping past 10, you're probably including channels that fail Rule 1.

Rule 4: Match the wording to how customers talk

"Word of mouth" is marketer-speak. "A friend told me" is how a human remembers it. Use the everyday phrasing. "Saw it in a store" beats "Retail / wholesale partner." The closer the option is to the buyer's actual memory, the more accurate the answer.

Tailor the list to your store type

The right 7 options depend on what you sell. Here's a starting point by store profile.

Store type	Suggested options (plus Other)
Beauty / fashion DTC	Instagram, TikTok, Friend or family, Influencer, Google search, Email or text
Food / beverage	Friend or family, Saw it in a store, Event or pop-up, Instagram, Podcast
Supplements / wellness	Podcast, Influencer, Friend or family, Google search, YouTube, Reddit
Home / hardware goods	Google search, Pinterest, Friend or family, News article or blog, Instagram
B2B / wholesale-ish	Google search, Friend or colleague, Event or trade show, Email, LinkedIn

These aren't laws. They're a fast way to skip the blank-page problem. Pull the rows that fit, swap one or two, ship it.

Use branching to get the specifics that matter

A flat list tells you "Podcast" drove a sale. It doesn't tell you which podcast. For high-spend channels, the channel name alone isn't enough to make a budget call. That's where a follow-up question earns its place.

Set up branching so that picking a specific answer reveals one more question:

• Pick Podcast: show "Which show?" as short text or a dropdown of the podcasts you sponsor.
• Pick Influencer or creator: show "Who?" as short text. This is how you find out which creator actually converts versus which one just posts.
• Pick Saw it in a store: show a dropdown of your retail partners or a city field.
• Pick Other: show the catch-all free-text box from Rule 2.

The trick is restraint. Add the follow-up only to the one or two channels where the specific answer changes what you'd do next. Branch on everything and you've turned a 10-second survey into a chore. OrderSurvey supports multi-question surveys with pagination, so the follow-up lands on its own step and the customer who picked "Instagram" never sees the podcast question. For the full setup walkthrough, see the How did you hear about us survey playbook.

Analyzing the write-ins

Your structured options give you clean counts. The free-text answers are where the real intelligence hides, and most teams ignore them. Don't.

Here's a workflow that takes about 20 minutes a month:

1. Export everything. Pull a CSV of all responses. OrderSurvey exports the full set, structured answers and write-ins together, so you can sort and filter in a spreadsheet.
2. Bucket the "Other" text. Read the free-text column and tally repeats. If "saw it on a [specific Facebook group]" shows up eight times, that's a signal.
3. Promote recurring write-ins into real options. When an "Other" answer appears often enough to matter, give it its own line in the dropdown next cycle. Your list should evolve as your channels do.
4. Clean the influencer and podcast names. "joe rogan," "JRE," and "rogan podcast" are the same line. Normalize the spelling before you count, or you'll undercount your best partners.
5. Cross-reference with order value. Tie answers to the order so you can see not just which channel sends the most buyers, but which sends the most valuable ones. A channel with fewer responses and a higher average order value can beat a high-volume one.

That last point is the whole game. Counting responses tells you reach. Pairing the channel answer with revenue tells you where to put the next dollar. We walk through the math in calculating channel ROI from survey data.

A few things to avoid

• Don't make it required and trap people. A forced answer with no "Other" produces garbage. Someone who genuinely doesn't remember will click anything to finish.
• Don't split hairs customers can't. "Facebook ad" versus "Facebook post" assumes a level of recall buyers don't have. "Facebook" is enough.
• Don't let the list go stale. A list you wrote 18 months ago is missing every channel you've added since. Revisit it quarterly.
• Don't bury the question. Ask attribution first, on the thank-you page, before satisfaction prompts contaminate the memory.

Putting it together

Strong "how did you hear about us" options come down to a short, honest list of channels you actually fund, an "Other" box that's always open, branching on the one or two channels where the specifics matter, and a monthly habit of reading the write-ins. Build that and the dropdown stops being a guess and starts being a budget tool.

OrderSurvey runs all of this on Shopify's native checkout and order-status surfaces, with no code and no broad data scopes, on a free plan up to 100 responses every 30 days. If you're setting up your first attribution survey, the complete post-purchase survey guide is the place to start.