Trigger Events
Introduction
Trigger Events add another layer of control to target the right users at the exact right time in their product journey.
Without a Trigger Event, a user would see a survey widget the moment they match your Target Audience. While this can be sufficient for some cases, you most likely want to tweak the timing of your survey.
Please: Trigger Events only apply to users that are matching your Target Audience. Trigger Events won’t have any effect if a user does not match the Target Audience of your survey.
Trigger Events
Time Delay
The Time Delay Trigger is our most popular launch trigger and a great fit for a lot of use-cases.
The idea is simple: For users matching your Target Audience, Refiner waits for a specific amount of time to pass before showing your survey to them.
The Time Delay Trigger offers the following options:
- Wait Time: This is the time interval that needs to pass. Depending on your use-case, the Wait Time can be set to anything between a couple of seconds up to several days (more info below).
- Reference Moment: You can choose between different moments in a user’s journey which will be used as some kind of anchor point in time. You can choose between:
- User start a new session
- User enters your Target Audience
- User was seen for the first time
Combining the Time Delay trigger with Segment Based Targeting gives you a lot of control over when exactly a survey should appear. For example, you could create a user segment “Signed up 30 days ago” for your Target Audience and combine it with a Time Delay trigger of “3 minutes after starting a new session”.
When you are operating our web-client in Anonymous Users Mode, the reference time for the Time Delay trigger is always “First Seen”. This is the moment a visitor landed on your web application for the first time.
Page Visit
The Page Visit Trigger is a simple way of launching a survey once a user performs a specific action in your web application.
The Page Visit Trigger launches a survey when a user in your Target Audience visits a certain page (URL) of your app.
Some scenarios where this launch trigger comes in handy:
- Your user just purchased your product and gets redirected to an order confirmation page
- A user looks at your pricing page which indicates that they are considering purchasing your product
- A user just performed an important action in your app (e.g. created their first project)
- …
The Page Visit Trigger event can be set up by adding one or multiple Page Rules as shown in the screenshot below.
Each rule has a comparison method followed by a comparison value. The supported comparison methods are:
| Method | Description | Example Value |
| Equals | Triggers on pages where the full URL equals exactly the provided value. | https://app.domain.com/account/billing |
| Starts with | Triggers on all URLs that start with the provided value. | https://app.domain.com/account |
| Contains | Triggers when the provided value is located somewhere in the page URL. | /account/ |
| Matches Pattern | Triggers on URLs that match a provided wildcard pattern. You can use * to indicate that variable parts of a URL. | https://app.domain.com/*/something/* |
When you add multiple rules, a match occurs when at least one rule returns a positive result.
A survey is shown to a user when any of the page rules match for the first time. If you want to launch the survey each time one of the rules matches (e.g. on a checkout page), you can set the “Recurring Survey” to “Repeating”.
Manual
While our “Page visit” and “Time delay” do a great job for most of our customers, there are some use cases for which launching a survey “ad-hoc” makes sense.
To launch a survey at a specific moment, you need to execute the “showForm” method of our JavaScript client as shown in the screenshot below. You can find more information about triggering surveys programmatically in the Client Reference.
To identify your survey, you can either use the survey ID that was automatically generated by Refiner, or define your own custom identifier. Using your own custom identifier allows you to swap out a survey without changing your code, or launch the same type of surveys in different projects / environments (testing vs prod).
By default, the survey is shown to the use only once. All subsequent “showForm” method calls won’t result in any additional survey views.
You can also launch a survey every time the Javascript method is called. To enable this behaviour, set the “Repetition” option to “Repeatedly”.
In both cases, the Target Audience, Page Rules and Survey Throttling settings are respected.
If you want to launch a survey without any checks, for example for testing purposes, you can add an additional “force” parameter when executing the Javascript command.
Recurring Surveys
If you want to collect more than one response from each user, you can enable the “Recurrence” option. Depending on the Trigger Event you chose, different options are available as described on this page.
On-show Delay
In the Page Rules section you’ll also find an On-Show Delay option which gives you the possibility to slightly delay the display or your survey. Usually, setting the delay to 3-5 seconds is a great way to give your users some time to settle in, without risking lower response rates.