How to Pipe Survey Data from a URL Variable Tutorial

Available to Professional, SurveyGizmo, Enterprise, and Dedicated Accounts

Piping from a URL Variable allows you to send outside information you have previously collected into your survey by adding a simple modifier to each individual link you send out.

Why would you want to do this?

Many survey creators already have pre-existing information about their survey respondents that they would like to ask about, without having to ask for the information again.

In the example we'll use to demonstrate how this function works, imagine a school was conducting a survey of what classes its students liked the best and why.

The school already knows the classes the students have taken, so they want to pipe that information into the set of questions they want to ask about the classes.

Piping from a URL Variable

Step One

Decide which question type you want to pipe into. Note - Currently only Dropdown Menu, list of dropdown menus, star ranking, and table questions work to pipe URL variable information into.

Step Two

Click on the piping tab on the left hand side when you edit the question and head over to the section labeled Pipe from a URL Variable

Step Three

Decide what you will be calling the URL variable that will send the piped values into your survey.

In keeping with our school example, we will be calling the variable "Class". We put the word "Class" under Variable name so that SurveyGizmo knows to recognize this word as the variable to pull information from.

Step Four

Add the rest of your questions to your survey and publish it.

Step Five

Create the link you will send out to your respondents, but before you send it out, you'll want to add few extra pieces to the end of the URL so the data you want piped in goes into the survey.

The first thing you want to do is get the URL, so in our example, our URL looks like this:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/522136/Pipe-from-URL-Variable

Then you want to append the variable your set up in Step Three to the end of your URL. So in our example, it will look like this:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/522136/Pipe-from-URL-Variable/?class

You need to add the "/?" before the variable name so that SurveyGizmo knows you're adding another attribute to your URL

Then you want to add the unique class names (going with our example) that you want piped in to your question. In our example, for this particular link we want to ask about physics, algebra, history, and gymnastics.

To do this, we set up the URL like this:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/522136/Pipe-from-URL-Variable/?class=physics;algebra;history;gymnastics

The semicolon after each class lets SurveyGizmo know that you want a new answer option to start.

Step Six

Send out your links with individual variables attached and start getting responses. Below you can see an example of what the piped question with answered put in looks like:

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