Refiner Quickstart

This guide takes you from a new Refiner account to your first live survey.

It focuses on In-App Surveys, which are Refiner’s primary use case and require a small amount of technical setup before you can start collecting feedback.

If you want to create a Survey Page or Email Survey instead, you can skip the SDK installation and user identification steps and continue directly with the dedicated documentation for that Delivery Method.

Step 1: Install Refiner

To display surveys inside your web or mobile application, you first need to install one of the Refiner SDKs.

This is generally a one-time setup. Once Refiner is installed, you can create new surveys, change their content, and adjust most campaign settings directly from the Refiner dashboard without making additional code changes.

Web applications

For Web App Surveys, install the JavaScript SDK.

You can install it using:

• A JavaScript code snippet
• Google Tag Manager
• Our NPM package

Choose the installation method that best matches your application and follow the corresponding JavaScript SDK installation guide.

Mobile applications

For Mobile App Surveys, install the Refiner Mobile SDK for your platform.

Refiner supports:

• iOS
• Android
• React Native
• Flutter

Follow the installation instructions for your platform.

Step 2: Identify your users

For applications with logged-in users, we recommend identifying users whenever possible.

Send Refiner a unique user identifier – typically the user ID from your own application – and optionally additional user traits such as:

• Plan
• Role
• Account type
• Signup date
• Company
• Language
• Any other information useful for targeting or analysis

Identifying users allows Refiner to:

• Link responses to the correct user
• Target surveys using user traits and behavior
• Track previous survey interactions
• Recognize users across sessions
• Add user context to survey responses
• Sync feedback with external tools

You decide which user data you want to send to Refiner. There is no need to import everything from your application.

Anonymous website visitors

Web App Surveys can also be used on public websites without identifying visitors.

If you want to survey anonymous visitors, configure the JavaScript SDK accordingly and select the appropriate Audience Type for the survey.

Anonymous users provide fewer targeting and integration options than identified users.

Step 3: Track user behavior (optional)

You can send behavioral data to Refiner when you want surveys to appear at specific moments in the user journey.

For example, you might track when a user:

• Completes onboarding
• Uses a particular feature
• Creates their first project
• Makes a purchase
• Upgrades their plan

Web applications can send Tracked Events through the JavaScript or Mobile SDK.

Mobile applications can send Tracked Events and information about the current screen the user is viewing.

This step is optional.

For your first survey, you can keep the setup simple and add behavioral tracking later if your targeting strategy requires it.

Step 4: Create a survey

Go to Surveys in your Refiner dashboard and click Create survey.

Creating a survey starts with two choices.

Choose a Delivery Method

For this Quickstart, choose:

• Web App Survey for a web application or website
• Mobile App Survey for a mobile application

Refiner also supports other Delivery Methods, such as Survey Pages, Email Surveys, and Embed Surveys.

Choose a Template

After choosing the Delivery Method, select one of our ready-to-use Survey Templates or start from scratch.

Templates are available for common use cases such as:

• NPS
• CSAT
• CES
• Product research
• User onboarding
• Churn research
• User profiling
• Marketing attribution
• Calls-to-action and announcements

Templates are only starting points. You can change every part of the survey after selecting one.

Step 5: Customize your survey

Use the Survey Editor to adapt the survey to your needs.

You can:

• Add, remove, and reorder questions
• Change wording and answer options
• Add follow-up questions
• Create branching logic
• Add message panels or calls-to-action
• Customize the design

For your first survey, we recommend keeping things simple.

A short survey with one clear objective is easier to test and usually leads to a better user experience.

Step 6: Choose who should see the survey

In-App Surveys use a Target Audience to determine which users are eligible to see a survey.

You can target users based on criteria such as:

• User Segments
• User traits
• User behavior
• Previous survey interactions
• Country
• Language
• Device type
• Mobile platform

For your first test, a broad audience such as All logged-in users is often the easiest option.

Once everything is working, you can create more precise audiences.

Step 7: Choose when the survey appears

The Launch Trigger determines when an eligible user sees the survey.

Depending on your setup, surveys can be triggered:

• Immediately
• After a time delay
• When a user visits a page
• When a user visits a screen
• When a Tracked Event occurs
• Programmatically

For your first survey, an Immediate or simple Time Delay trigger makes testing easier.

You can introduce more contextual triggers later.

Step 8: Preview and test your survey

Before publishing, review the survey and verify that the questions, survey flow, and design look correct.

Preview Web App Surveys

Web App Surveys include a preview option that lets you display the survey directly inside your application.

The preview is intended to verify the appearance and survey flow.

It does not evaluate your Target Audience, Launch Trigger, delays, or other delivery conditions.

Test the actual delivery flow

To test the complete setup, publish the survey and use a test user.

Check that:

• Refiner is installed correctly
• The test user is identified, if required
• The user matches the Target Audience
• The Launch Trigger conditions are met
• The survey is published
• You are testing in the correct Refiner environment

For Web App Surveys, the JavaScript SDK’s Debug Mode can help diagnose installation, identification, and survey delivery issues.

Step 9: Publish your survey

When everything looks correct, publish the survey.

Published In-App Surveys can start appearing to users who match the Target Audience and Launch Trigger conditions.

You can unpublish a survey at any time if you want to stop collecting new responses or make additional changes.

Your first survey is live

Once the survey appears correctly for your test user, your core Refiner setup is complete.

From here, you can start exploring the rest of the platform:

• Responses – Review and filter incoming feedback
• Tags – Categorize qualitative responses manually or with AI
• Dashboards – Track metrics and trends
• Notifications – Alert your team when important events occur
• Digests – Share recurring summaries and metrics
• Integrations – Send feedback data to other tools in your stack

For more advanced In-App Survey configuration, continue with the In-App Surveys documentation.

You can configure features such as recurrence, Follow-Up Mode, sampling, throttling, scheduling, location restrictions, and cross-campaign behavior.

Need help?

If you have any questions while setting up Refiner, contact our support team.

We can help with SDK installation, user identification, targeting, survey configuration, integrations, and other onboarding questions.

Visit Contact Support to get in touch.