sguid: Returning Respondents to their Individual Response

Please Note:This is a tutorial for SurveyGizmo 2.0 users. We will be updating this for SurveyGizmo 3.0 users ASAP

If you are looking for a built-in method for SurveyGizmo to provide your respondents with a unique link to return to their response, you can use Email Invitations (all paid plans) or the Save and Continue link feature (Pro plan or higher). sguid is designed to be generated/managed by the survey creator issuing and creating the links (Advanced Users).

sguid is a feature available within SurveyGizmo that allows you to append information to the end of the survey link which will link this information to a single response (creating a new one if one did not yet exist) for that survey. This makes use of SurveyGizmo's Query String compatibility which is heavily documented in the 'Passing Values' tutorial series. sguid is the variable name, and its value is the unique identifier used to identify one visitor from another, and the value that will link to the individual response.

To save from confusion, here is an example survey link with this in use:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/12345/example-survey?sguid=user112

In this example, you'll notice a few details:

• sguid should be written as sguid (all lowercase is required)
• user112 is the unique value and can be any mix of alphanumeric characters (all letters and numbers) with no punctuation, symbols, or spaces
• user112 would not be unique from USER112 because the value is case-insensitive (Latin character set)

If the survey was already started and partially completed using the sguid of user112, returning to that link later would return the user to that specific response with their previous answers already present! If they were to then visit the link using an sguid of john916 and this was the first time it was ever used, a brand new response would be started for john916.

When a user returns to their response via the sguid, they will be returned to the beginning of the survey, regardless of the response status (Completed, Partial, Abandoned). The only exception is with the use of Duplicate Protection noted below. If you are embedding the survey and dynamically generating the embedding code to incorporate the query string value into the embed code, the iFrame embed method is the only method that is compatible with sguid.

The unique value you use for sguid is generated by you. SurveyGizmo does not offer an sguid generator. We recommend using email invitations in that scenario to generate unique links.

Uses for sguid

The following scenarios are situations where one would make use of sguid.

• Sending email invitations through a 3rd party tool that has merge code capabilities. The emails could be constructed to append the user's unique Subscriber ID as the sguid value with the link.
• Managing a social network and providing feedback survey links to logged in members that associates the data with their User ID and links them to a single response with the User ID as the unique value for sguid.
• Generating a unique code for a 'pay-for' survey to track the individual but also to ensure that they cannot change their answers once it is completed (Duplicate Protection and sguid)

sguid is compatible with Private Domains (Enterprise level accounts)

Duplicate Protection

Under Edit Survey > Advanced Options there are a few different settings available under Duplicate Protection (Pro and higher plans). One of these options is URL Variable Based protection, which changes the behaviour of sguid links. Previously, if the response was completed, returning with the same sguid would bring you to the beginning of the completed response. With Duplicate Protection set to URL Variable Based, returning to the completed response would instead display the custom Duplicate Message you set, thus ensuring that one could change their answers only if the response was NOT completed.

Also, be aware that only the iFrame embed method will work with URL Variable duplicate protection.