Survey External Fields allow you to read data from another data source and apply it in your questionnaire. The External fields feature allows you to pull in data from other data sources, such as a spreadsheet, and pull it back into our software.
You can use this feature to calculate a score and match it outside the software to, later on, use the value in your Outcomes, Final Screen, or Questions.
This guide will teach you:
1. Set up External Fields
First, you need to set up your External Fields. Click on the 3 dots at the top right-hand corner of the screen and select External Fields.
Now, you can Add Field or Import it.
2. External Fields in Survey
Go back to your questionnaire and click on the Extra options tab.
Scroll down to the Integrations and click External Fields.
Once you toggle the button, you can add your fields. Click Add field and choose the field you want to use.
Now you can copy-paste your External Field variable and use it in your Outcomes, Final page, or Questions.
3. Activate API Key
One more thing you'll need to do for the feature to work is to use an API key. Check if you have one by going to My Account.
Scroll down to Technical info. If you see an API key already there, that's great! If not, click generate an API key - and that's all! Just hitting generate is enough and the feature is ready!
It is not possible to reference External Fields with Filter Sheet values or Compare Sheet values active. The reason for this is that external fields with the filter & compare active would have too big an impact for lookup at the start of the questionnaire.
The number of External Fields that can be referenced on a questionnaire is limited to 100
What's next?
- Google Tag Manager is a tag system that can be used for tracking and analytics on websites. It can be used to track respondents' behavior in your questionnaire or to find out how effective an advert promoting your questionnaire has been.
- Zapier is a tool that enables the transfer of data from one web app to another one. By using Zapier, you can send the data collected within your questionnaire to create contacts in Pointerpor or send data to apps such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, Trello, and many more. For example, to transfer email addresses collected in a questionnaire to a Mailchimp email list.
- Integromat allows you to automate many processes and simplifies the transfer of information between apps, saving you bags of time! Integromat offers similar features to Zapier but is more powerful as you can set a single event to trigger a number of different actions to be taken simultaneously.