Please see Fullstory's developer documentation for more detailed API information:
Note: We officially released V2 of our Set User Properties Browser API (e.g. setProperties) on November 1st, 2023. If you're still using V1 of our Browser API (e.g. FS.setUserVars), please refer to our V1 API documentation found here.
If you were using Fullstory prior to August 3rd, 2023 and aren't sure which version of our Browser API is compatible with the data capture snippet deployed on your website, please refer to these instructions to confirm.
Anytime you want to capture custom user properties or integrate with external tools (such as help desk software) you can call our Set User Properties API.
The properties displayName and email are examples of system fields. A system field is a built-in field that Fullstory can use in special ways. For example, setting displayName will give each user a distinct display name in the Fullstory UI that can also be used in search.
|
System Field |
Type |
What it does |
|---|---|---|
uid |
string |
Explicitly sets the unique identifier for the user |
displayName |
string |
Displays clear & distinct user names |
email |
string |
Displays user's email address |
Other hypothetical custom fields such as, pricing_plan, popup_help, and total_spent are examples of things you could capture and later leverage in a search to find sessions of users with specific characteristics.
For example, using the custom fields above, you could answer questions such as:
- Why haven't certain freemium users made in-app purchases?
- How many freemium users have spent more than $10.50 on in-app purchases?
- Who leaves pop-up help turned on most often: free, basic, or pro users?
Suffice it to say, custom user fields are pretty powerful.
User Properties in Action
When a user property is set, it will be preserved on a user until it is changed. The current value of a user property will be attached to every event (click, activity, custom event) as it happens. The value of the user property will be preserved for that event to be the actual value set at the time the event occurred. Changes to a user property will not effect previous events. Fullstory does not go back and change the values associated with previous events.
Example Scenarios:
Example 1: You are searching for the exact session where users signed up for something (ie. loyalty rewards, membership, plan type, etc.)
For this example, let's say we are passing a user variable for signup_status with two options: none or standard. If you just filtered on users with a standard sign-up status, you would see sessions from all of your signed up users, but not the exact session when they signed up. If you just filtered on users that clicked sign-up, you may get some false positives of existing members that clicked that button again for some reason.
However, if you set your user filter to signup_status is standard and then add an event filter of Clicked text is sign-up when the signup_status is none, you'll find the exact session when the user went from not signed up to signed up. Fullstory will pull sessions of existing signed-up users who performed the specific event when they weren't signed-up. The value here is that the user variable is preserved with the event.
Example 2: You are searching for the first purchase session for your top spenders.
For this example, let's say we are passing a user variable of lifetimeSpend. You can start your search using a user filter of lifetimeSpend is greater than $5K (for example) and an event filter of Clicked text is purchase when the lifetimeSpend is 0. Fullstory will pull existing users who have spent above $5K before and then will show the exact session where they clicked purchase when they hadn't spent anything at the time of that specific event.