Hidden Value

What is this?

A hidden value allows you to capture data in your survey that your survey respondent can’t see, but can be used for gathering data, storing browser information, and even pre-populating questions later in the survey.

What can a hidden value capture?

A hidden value can record the time someone spent on a page or survey, URL variables, and can track anything we’ve got a merge code for.

A few examples of things you can track with merge codes:

• Geodata (country, IP address, langitude, longitude, etc.)
• SurveyGizmo Email Invite Fields (including Custom Fields)
• Survey Links
• Edit Links
• Time and Date
• Previous Question Values

When would I use it?

There are an infinite number of times when you can use hidden values. You could use it to do the following:

• When you’d like to assign a random number to each respondent
• When you want to capture a users geodata (such as country, IP address, langitude, longitude…etc)
• When you want to pre-populate a question later in the survey
• When you want to pass a Panel company ID through a URL and have it used to track whether or not a respondent finished the survey
• Use them to trigger whether or not pages/questions are hidden

Using Hidden Values for all these options can really help you customize your survey and data collection the way you want it, instead of being based on a pre-built template that may not suit your needs. It can also help you improve your survey.

If you track how long it takes for your respondents to take a particular page, or your survey, this can help you hone your surveys to make them faster and more convenient for your survey takers.

What should I avoid?

We advise that if you plan on using hidden values to collect URL variables, to avoid using the variable ‘id’. We currently use ‘id’ in many places within our application as a URL variable. If you were to pull ‘id’ from an external source as a URL variable, it may cause some confusion in the system because it won’t know what to look for.

Articles Related to Hidden Values

• Tutorial: Merge Codes
• Tutorial: Capturing URL Variables in Hidden Values