Adding meta data to enhance your web surveys

Adding meta data to your web survey provides a powerful way to increase your view of feedback, allowing you to filter feedback by (for example) segment, product, user, price points or internal owner.

The meta data is added by populating fields in the tracking code. You will need to add the variables used by your website to populate these meta data fields.

For example, if you are using a CMS (such as WordPress), you can use the WordPress variables to add the username to the tracking code so this is recorded along with the feedback.

In the SightMill tracking code (in Settings/Web Surveys/How to install), you will see that there are 8 fields at the start of the tracking code:

$SiML.email = "";

$SiML.firstname = "";

$SiML.lastname = "";

$SiML.tags = "";

$SiML.segment = "";

$SiML.product = "";

$SiML.spend = "";

$SiML.owner = "";

These fields can, between the double-quotes, contain any additional information you want to store with the feedback for a particular user.

A few examples would be to include the user's email address if they have an account on your website, or the product they have just bought, the price (or spend) for the product, and you can also include multiple tags (separated by commas).

Here's an example of a populated tracking fields:

$SiML.email = "hayley-sw1@example.org";

$SiML.firstname = "Jessica";

$SiML.lastname = "Stickle";

$SiML.tags = "service";

$SiML.segment = "Retail";

$SiML.product = "Bronze-plan";

$SiML.spend = "$1500";

$SiML.owner = "CF";

This would be stored with the feedback and displayed in your account in the Verbatims tab:

How to populate the fields

How you include data in the tracking fields depends on the website software you are using. If you are using a bespoke site, your web developers will be able to help you automatically insert the appropriate variables to populate the fields. For example, in WordPress to insert the user's email address into the field you would use the $current_user->user_email variable (you'll find more information on the Wordpress codex)

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