How to use Hidden Fields

Hidden Fields allow you to use data that you already have, track information about your respondents, and make your typeforms more personal.

Hidden Fields can be used for lots of things:

Track the source of respondents (social media channels, for example)
Segment your audience for deeper insights and analysis
Customize your typeform to make it even more personal

How do Hidden Fields work?

Hidden Fields allows you to place data that you already have directly in your typeform URL. You can view all your data in the Results panel.

What types of information can be passed with Hidden Fields?

You can include any information you want, for example:

The person’s name (so that you can use Recall Information to welcome each respondent personally)
The email of your respondent (so you know who completed the typeform)
Traffic source (so that you know where someone saw your typeform – Facebook, website etc)
If you sell shoes, you can even capture the person’s shoe size (so you always have that information stored for future transactions through your typeforms)

Note! If you add your Google Analytics tracking code to a typeform, you are responsible for the data collected by Google Analytics. If you’re using Hidden Fields that include personally identifiable information, like name or email address, etc, you must ensure this information is added to the ‘Exclude URL Query Parameters’ field in Google Analytics’ view settings. Collecting this data breaks Google’s Terms of Service. Here’s how to do this: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1010249?hl=en.

How to add Hidden Fields to your typeform

1. Open your typeform from your workspace. On the right panel, click Logic, then Advanced. You can now see the Hidden Fields option:

2. Click Hidden Fields, and a new dialog will open where you can add your Hidden Fields:

3. Click the + Add Hidden Field, then type in what you want to call it:

Click the + button again to add more Hidden Fields as required, then hit Save.

Whatever you write for your Hidden Fields, they’ll be converted to lower-case letters automatically.

4. Your Hidden Fields will be added to your typeform's share URL once you have published it. To see them, head to the Share panel:

Click Copy link, then you can paste it wherever you like. If you want to add information to the Hidden Fields manually, you can do this by pasting your link, and replacing the xxxxx with the word you want.

My Hidden Field is for tracking the source of my respondents, so I would change xxxxx to "twitter" or "facebook" for sharing on those networks.

Hidden Fields breakdown

After adding Hidden Fields to your typeform, a string of characters will be added to the URL of the typeform. Here is an example:

https://tutorials.typeform.com/to/nzthWI#name=xxxxx&source=xxxxx

In this example we are placing two parameters into two distinct Hidden Fields, these are:

name
source

The “xxxxx” after “name=” and “source=” are the Hidden Fields. The “xxxxx” needs to be replaced with real data in order for the typeform to pass the data into your results. You cannot currently populate score and price variables through Hidden Fields.

Using our example above, if Fran was sent their typeform through Twitter, then the URL would look like this:

https://tutorials.typeform.com/to/nzthWI#name=Fran&source=twitter

Now your typeform will automatically fill your results with the following data:

name: fran
source: twitter

And you won’t have to ask for their data using a question in the typeform. How cool is that?

You can pass text in the Hidden Field with a space. This can come in handy when passing, for instance, full names, like “Jane Doe”. You need to replace the spaces with “%20” in the URL in order for the Hidden Field to appear with the space in your results and/or typeform. So your URL would look like this:

https://example.typeform.com/to/AbCdEf#fullname=Jane%20Doe

And that's not all: you can encode any character using UTF-8 percent encoding.

How do you make this work?

There are 2 ways to implement this feature:

Manually – you manually add information to the Hidden Fields in the URL before sharing your typeform.

Automated – you can use your CRM system (Salesforce, Infusionsoft, Netsuite, etc.) to populate your data, so up to thousands of people can receive a custom URL Typeform. Please read these articles for more details:

Using Hidden Fields with embedded typeforms

You can easily add a Hidden Field like “source” to a typeform that’s already embedded, but remember that this changes the URL of your typeform.

You need to paste in the new embed code you find in the Share panel and edit it manually:

Let’s say you want to track the source – where people complete your typeform. Paste the code from the Share panel into your website, then change the ‘xxxxx’ to read whatever you want, like ‘homepage’ or ‘web’, for example.

Now you’ll be able to see in your Responses how many respondents answered your typeform from your website!

Note! If you want to pass information to the typeform URL of an embedded typeform from outside the iframe, it is possible, but requires some coding skills. Please note that we cannot troubleshoot custom code or give development instructions in the event that something in your custom implementation is not working!

What will it look like when I collect data?

Data from Hidden Fields will appear in your Results Summary and Responses.

In your Summary, you can see all the results that came through with data from Hidden Fields:

Screen_Shot_2021-01-11_at_11.57.25_AM.png

In your Responses tab, you can see each individual submission and its Hidden Field data:

Screen_Shot_2021-01-11_at_11.57.57_AM.png

Give it a shot. Copy this link, paste it in a web browser and replace the “xxxxx” with your name and an imagined source, like ‘facebook’. Then hit ‘enter’ and see what the typeform does.

https://tutorials.typeform.com/to/nzthWI#name=xxxxx&source=xxxxx

How to use the collected Hidden Fields information in your typeform

Apart from passing data into your results, you can do two more things with Hidden Fields:

Add Hidden Fields to a question in your typeform. Find out how in this article: Recall Information
Use Recall Information to set up Logic. Refer to this article to learn more: Use multi-branching and Advanced Logic to show relevant questions