When should I use anonymous web link and when personalized links?
Anonymous links don’t have the ability to individually track by respondents.
This may be necessary if you (for example) publish the link on a website, or post however it is not ideal. Unless you have other controls (cookies, email capture etc) there is no way to prevent multiple participation by the same person. In addtion, auditability is compromised.
Personalised links track the ID of the participant into the survey and on exit. They require some more setup but give one more control over tracking and auditing respondent sampling.
Thanks for the information, is there a tutorial or info available that shows how to create the personalised links? Many thanks
Laura,
Firstly welcome to the forum - this is moderated by volunteers, staff and today - the company director. So I hope I can be of help.
Firstly - personalised links are the minimum standard - I would not recommend using anonymous links in any case unless you have a secondary way of verifying identify.
And for your sanity - please read our Fraud detection toolkit before doing this yourself.
The actual process is simple and there is a link to the documentation below - rather there are considerations before you run off and just paste in links and callbacks.
If you are doing this yourself, you will also need to to invest in some tool that generates the links and sends them. This could be mailchimp for email or some sort of social media tool, Hubspot or even excel.
If you are using a panel, you might want to use more than one - as the potential for fraud is high but luckily disproportionate by provider. Having at least 2 will give you a basis for comparison.
You just create one invitation per panel and give them the surveyengine link. They may ask that the id paramater be something specific - like ‘sid’ or ‘user_id’ you ca nupdate that per provider.
They will then give you ‘passbacks’. These tell surveyengine where to send the respondent on completion - whether screened out, complete or over quota. This is important for external auditing and ultimately payment. You’ll also need to help them test it.
!! be sure in your survey to correctly identfy screenouts with the ‘complete’ element otherwise all respondents will be considered ‘complete’
There is documentation below - you can also contact support@surveyengine.com who can help with the panel integration and management.