Imagine you are an e-commerce company and you are surveying your customer base on their satisfaction and you want to know what product the particular respondent had purchased from your company but you didn’t want to require the user to remember or tell you this information because they may not remember the exact name of the product or you are afraid that this might deter them from completing the survey.
Now in SurveyTown you can pass that information to us and we will store that information right along side the survey responses without the user have to type it in themselves. The way we do this is through URL Variables which simply means you can pass us the information “on the link” and we will store it for you when we store the response to allow you to know for example how people who product ABC rated their satisfaction against the customers who bought product XYZ.
So, when you add a URL variable to the link, instead of a survey link looking like this…
https://s.surveytown.com/survey/?c=200011&id=13
The link would have a variable on the end and look like this…
https://s.surveytown.com/survey/?c=200011&id=13&productid=ABC
… where ABC is the would be the product ID of the your product that that customer had purchased in our example. (NOTE: You would need append the product id to you survey link using your email marketing software or dynamically from your application.)
![When you add a variable to a URL, you fill in the information in the brackets with your own data, which is [productid_value] in the above example.](https://surveytown.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/URL-variables-creation.png)
Of course the thing you may want to track will be completely different from a product id. Maybe for your business it might be a donor type or zip code. That is totally fine. You can create the variables to track whatever you like AND you can add as many of them into your survey as you need.
Once we collect the information you send us and attach it to the survey you can find your data in the survey exports.
When you add a variable to a URL, you fill in the information in the brackets with your own data, which is [productid_value] in the above example.
What happens after a respondent takes a survey with a URL variable attached to it is we store the information and when you go to download you survey results, your URL variable will be shown along side the survey results.
From there you can slice and dice your data and bring your results to life with data you supplied to us.
Also see: A full tutorial on setting URL Variables on your surveys.
URL variables are a great way to integrate data into your survey responses. This allows you to understand more things about your survey responses by knowing things about who responded right along side their survey responses. This allows you to understand more and make great decisions.