How do I pause or close a launched survey?

There is no single button that closes a whole survey. Instead, you pause data collection for each participant source separately. A survey stops accepting responses once all its sources are paused. Responses already collected are kept and remain available in your report.

How to pause a participant source

1. Open your experiment and go to the Experiment status tab.
2. In the Participant sources table, click the name of the source you want to stop (for example, “Your own respondents 1”). This opens the source on the Participant sources tab.
3. In the Data collection section of that source, click Pause and confirm.

Repeat this for every source that is still collecting responses. Once all sources are paused, the Experiment status tab shows “Participants’ responses are not currently accepted.”

What happens depends on the source type

Bring your own respondents

Pausing stops the shareable link from accepting responses. Anyone who opens the link sees (by default) “Sorry, we do not currently accept responses to this survey.” To collect more responses later, click Re-start in the same place.

If your link has been shared more widely than you intended, you can switch to a new link instead:

1. On the Participant sources tab, click the Copy button () next to the source in the sidebar. The copy gets its own new shareable link.
2. Save your changes and share the new link with the respondents you want.
3. Pause the original source so its old link stops accepting responses.

Responses from both sources stay in the same experiment and report.

Email campaign

Pausing the source also stops sending emails in the campaign. You can restart it later, unless the campaign has already finished. See Email invitations for more on managing launched campaigns.

Self-serve sample

Pausing starts a reconciliation period of up to 48 hours for quality checks, after which the cost of responses you paid for but did not receive is returned to your prepaid balance. If you need more respondents afterwards, add another participant source.

Predefined panel

Data collection on a Predefined panel stops automatically once your required number of responses is reached. To pause the study earlier, please contact the support team .

Stop collecting automatically at a target number

For the Bring your own respondents and Email campaign source types, you can set the source to pause itself once it reaches a set number of responses using Autopause:

1. In the source’s settings on the Participant sources tab, expand the Autopause section.
2. Check Enable autopause and enter the Desired number of responses.
3. Save your changes.

Pausing or restarting a source manually turns Autopause off, so set it again if you still need it. See Setting up quotas for this and other ways to limit responses.

Editing a survey after launch

You do not need to pause a survey to edit it, and pausing does not apply your edits. Changes take effect for new respondents only after you click Save changes. Some edits are restricted once a survey is launched. See how to edit questions in a launched experiment.

After launch, the Preview survey as participants button is replaced by the shareable link, and a paused source’s link does not accept responses. To check your changes, see how to preview your study as a respondent.

If you do not see a pause control for your source, please contact Conjointly support for assistance.