Guides and Surveys - Personalizing Content

If you would like to evaluate Guides and Surveys, please reach out to a member of your account team or fill out this form to be connected with a Fullstory team member.

Who can use this feature?
- Part of Guides and Surveys, an add-on for Business, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.
- Requires an Admin, Architect, or Standard role to configure.

Guides and Surveys is in active development. Product functionality and documentation may change without notice.

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

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

Note: Fullstory user properties can also be used for tag placeholder substitution in Guides and Surveys content, through one of two methods:

  • Set in the browser before your content loads: Properties set client-side (for example, with FS('setProperties')) before your Guides and Surveys content loads are available immediately.
  • Synced from Fullstory: Other user properties sync to Guides and Surveys approximately every five minutes and are available only if they're also used in the content's targeting rules. The reserved displayName and email properties aren't available through this method.

For details, see Can I use Fullstory user properties for personalization?

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:

Tag name Example of usage
FirstName "Hello {firstName}, welcome to our product!"
CartValue "You have {CartValue} products in your cart. Go to checkout."
SiteName "Thank you for visiting {SiteName}. Have fun here!"

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. There are two ways a property becomes available for personalization, depending on when and how it's set:

  • Set in the browser before your content loads: Properties set client-side with FS('setProperties') or FS('setIdentity') before your Guides and Surveys content loads are available for personalization immediately. This method isn't limited to properties used in targeting rules. Because timing matters, we recommend setting relevant user properties on every page load rather than only at login.
  • Synced from Fullstory: User properties that aren't set in the browser before your content loads become available through a periodic sync, approximately every five minutes. Through this method, a property is available for personalization only if it's also included in the content's targeting rules—for example, a User properties condition such as firstName exists.

If a property is available through both methods, the value set in the browser takes priority.

Note: The reserved displayName and email properties are not supported through the five-minute sync. To use them for personalization, set them in the browser before your Guides and Surveys content loads, as described in the first method above.

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.


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