Guides and Surveys - Personalizing Content

Guides and Surveys allows you to provide personalized experiences to your users by including dynamic messages tailored to each user's unique context. By setting user tags, you can display individualized content in tours, surveys, banners, and checklists.

In this article:

• Setting up personalized content
  • Using tag placeholders in Guides and Surveys content
  • Using fallback values
• Frequently Asked Questions

Setting up personalized content

To enable personalization, use the Guides and Surveys Browser API to set user tags.

You can set tags by defining window.usetifulTags before the main Guides and Surveys script loads on your website:

<script>
window.usetifulTags = {
    tagName: "tagvalue",
    tagNameAnother: "tagvalueanother"
};
</script>

Using tag placeholders in Guides and Surveys content

Once the script is in place, you can refer to the tag values as variables in your content editor. Use curly brackets to include the tag name. For example: {tagName}.

Here are some examples of commonly used tags and how to use them:

Important notes about tags:

• Tag names must be strings; tag values must be strings or numbers.
• Tags are stored in browser localStorage and are accessible by any code running on the page. Avoid including sensitive personal information in tag values.

Using fallback values

If a tag placeholder can't be resolved (for example, the tag hasn't been set for a particular user), you can specify a fallback value to display instead. Add the fallback value after the tag name, separated by a pipe character: {tagName|fallback_value}.

For example, the placeholder {user_name|there} displays "Hello there, welcome to our product!" for users who don't have a user_name tag value set, and "Hello Alex, welcome to our product!" for users where user_name is set to "Alex".

Placeholders are resolved in the following order of priority:

1. Fullstory user property
2. Tag
3. Fallback value (if provided)

Fallback values work anywhere you can use a tag placeholder, including rich-text content and URLs (for example, page targeting or redirect URLs).

You can also use tags to segment your users. For details, see Guides and Surveys: Segmenting Users.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Fullstory user properties for personalization?

Yes. Fullstory user properties can be resolved as tag placeholders, and there are two ways this can happen, depending on when and how the property is set:

• Set during the current session: Properties set with FS('setProperties') or FS('setIdentity') during the visitor's current browsing session are available for personalization immediately, as long as they're set before your Guides and Surveys content loads. For this reason, we recommend setting relevant user properties on every page load rather than only at login. This path isn't limited to properties used in targeting rules.
• Set server-side only: Properties that are only available server-side (for example, set through the Server API, or accumulated/segment data) sync to Guides and Surveys approximately every five minutes. Only properties that are included in targeting rules are available for personalization through this path.

If a property is available through both paths, the value set during the current session takes priority.

For more information, see Guides and Surveys: Fullstory User Properties and the Working with Fullstory Analytics developer documentation.

What if my personalization isn't working in Preview mode?

The Guides and Surveys browser extension sometimes behaves differently than expected when it comes to personalization: it's meant for visual QA, so it doesn't always resolve tag placeholders like {tagName} the same way they'd resolve for a real visitor. To preview content with personalization fully applied, publish the content and use the workaround described in Preview content without the browser extension.