Survey software company SurveyMonkey Inc. cheered investors Tuesday with a smaller-than-expected loss in its first quarterly earnings report since going public.

Revenue also came in above estimates, helping the company’s stock jump in after-hours trading.

The San Mateo, California-based company reported an adjusted loss of a penny a share. Revenue was up 18 percent to $65.2 million. The results were far better than promised, with analysts expecting a loss of 5 cents per share on $62.9 million in revenue.

Still, the company ultimately recorded a net loss for the third quarter of $102.4 million, which it put down to a onetime stock compensation charge related to its initial public offering in September.

SurveyMonkey sells digital survey and data analytics tools to both enterprises and individual users. Its customers use this software to obtain feedback about their products so they can be optimized for specific use cases. The growing popularity of these kinds of experience management tools was highlighted earlier this week, when SurveyMonkey’s biggest rival, Qualtrics Inc., was acquired by SAP SE just days ahead of its own planned IPO.

The big appeal from an enterprises’ perspective is that SurveyMonkey’s survey tools are both highly flexible and customizable, and also allow for data collected to be analyzed, L. Nicole France, principal analyst & vice president at Constellation Research, Inc., told SiliconANGLE.

“What we’re seeing is that the real value for companies (the high-paying customers) is not only in the ability to collect data from a particular audience, but how effectively you can analyze it to create something actionable,” France said. “The goal is to inform decision-making. That might be, say, determining whether letting customer service reps extend discounts to unhappy customers will improve their net promoter score or testing how strongly employees feel about the free beverage bar at HQ.”

SurveyMonkey likes to present itself as a kind of “experience management” platform that helps companies to better understand their customers through its surveys. This is important because companies are increasingly recognizing that they need to do a better job of building that customer understanding, France said. There’s also a need for companies to better engage with and understand their employees better, hence all the buzz around “experience management”, be it customer or employee experiences, the analyst added.

“Collecting the right data and analyzing it appropriately requires context, which is where positioning this stuff as “customer experience” or “employee experience,” for example, comes into play,” France said. “That makes it much easier for enterprise customers to adopt and use as they can very easily see how and where they might use these capabilities, complete with baked-in guidance on how to do it effectively.”

SurveyMonkey operates two businesses, including a self-serve business and a sales-assisted unit. The former accounted for 88 percent of its sales in the third quarter, but company officials said the latter is also showing promise with more rapid growth.

“We’re still early in the development and expansion of our sales-assisted strategy and we saw great traction with our sales efforts during the quarter, signing agreements with companies such as LinkedIn, Nasdaq, Sky and Intercom,” the company said in its shareholder letter. “By selling SurveyMonkey to the enterprise, we expect to accelerate paying user growth and increase both monetization and retention within organizations.”

Another positive to take home from the quarter is SurveyMonkey’s rising average revenue per user, which rose almost 15 percent, to $418 per user.

On the downside, SurveyMonkey’s overall losses continue to grow at a faster rate than its revenue on a percentage basis. The company said its negative operating margin for the quarter was 145 percent, compared with just 11 percent one year ago.

Despite this, analyst Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said the company had done well in its first quarter since going public, and that he expects it to continue along this path if it can keep on acquiring new customers. He said this is due to SurveyMonkey’s position as a provider of quality information, which is a critical point in an increasingly analytics-focused market.

“So long as its data sources and collection processes aren’t compromised in any way, the company’s way is clear,” King said. “It’s also interesting to consider whether SAP’s purchase of Qualitics might make SurveyMonkey a potential acquisition target. At this point, anything seems possible.”

If someone did decide to acquire SurveyMonkey it would most likely have to pay a premium though, as company’s stock is currently on an upswing. Its shares had jumped 42 percent, to $17 a share, on its public debut, only to take a beating in October following the news that Qualtrics was also planning to launch an IPO. Then came SAP’s announcement that it was buying Qualtrics, pushing the stock back up 7 percent on Monday. In the after-hours session today, the stock rose more than 6 percent.

SurveyMonkey also raised its guidance for the fourth quarter, saying it expects sales of between $64.8 million and $66.8 million. It also expects full-year revenue of between $251.2 million and $253.2 million.

Photo: SurveyMonkey/Facebook