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Tracking & Hidden fields

You can use hidden fields to include data you already have in your form URL and pass it onto your form. Doing so will help you personalize your respondents’ form experience and give you better insights into your results.

What is a hidden field?

A hidden field lets you track respondents and use already collected data to personalize your forms. It’s invisible to anyone filling out a form but lets you gather and use data effectively.

Some examples may include:

  • Track the traffic source of your respondent (social media, triggers on your website, or other)
  • Pass on information about your respondent to your responses (like name or email address)
  • Pass information from one form to another
  • Pass on UTM parameters to track marketing campaigns

Create a hidden field

  • Open the form builder and head to the Settings tab in the navigation menu at the top. From here, go to the Tracking and Hidden Fields section.
  • UTM parameters can be turned on or off by clicking on their respective toggle buttons.
  • To add a new hidden field, simply enter one or more values in the Hidden Field input section.

In this example, let's toggle on the UTM Source tracking field and add two custom hidden field's called name and ref. After making all the changes, click on the Submit button at the bottom to save your changes.

Create a new hidden field
Create a new hidden field

Find your form's unique sharable URL in the Share tab.

Share your form
Share your form

When you are ready to share the form, add the parameters and corresponding values to your URL before sharing the link. There are two ways to add the parameters:

  • Manually: add the variable to your form URL before sharing your form. Please ensure that the variable values have been url encoded.
  • Automated: use any CRM system (such as Salesforce) or email automation tool (such as Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign) to populate your data, so your respondents automatically receive a customized URL with the correct data.

Info

The first hidden field should start with ?. When adding multiple fields, separate them with &.

For example, if your respondent’s name is Donald Trump and the traffic source is email, the URL would look like this: https://share.formware.io/forms/67600317b333621b0a565c6a?utm_source=website&name=Donald%20Trump&ref=email

Hidden fields in form results

You will find the tracking and hidden fields alongside the other answers in the Results tab after respondents submit your form.

Results with hidden field
Results with hidden field