If you are sending personalized invitations (e.g. an email or a letter) to a group of potential respondents, you may want to provide them with an individualized link to the survey. The main reason for using them is that you can see who has answered without needing to ask for personal information. There are three ways of creating them: you can use a panel company, generate them yourself, or order them from us. To track who has answered, add either the Panel tracker or the UTM tracker element (using the parameter utm_term) to your survey, and you will find this information in your results Excel spreadsheet.
How does it work?
A standard survey link consists of these components:
So if you want to create an individualized link, you need to add a query string to it that contains the individualized code. In the example below, the UTM tracker is being used with the parameter term:
The parameter and the individual code vary, but you must always start the query string with an ? and if you want to use several parameters, you need to add & between each of them.
? = starts the query string
& = needed between each parameter if there are several
As stated, you can create the individualized links yourself or order them from us. If you decide to create them yourself, remember these few rules of thumb:
Never:
... include personal information in the individualized code (e.g. an email address)
... use codes or numbers in a sequence (e.g. code 1 is 1340, code 2 is 1341, 1342…) as it will be easy for others to guess what the other individualized codes are
... create codes that differ only in one or two characters, because then a simple error in typing may lead a person to answer through someone else's link
It’s a good idea to use at least 8 characters in the individualized code, and to use a web-based random string generator, such as random.org.
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