Custom user traits

Evan McGivern

Updated August 02, 2022 11:21

User traits are users' properties or attributes like a name or email that you can send to SatisMeter. These traits are stored in SatisMeter's record of your user and will help target your surveys and segment/filter responses. This article will show you what you can do with user traits and how to send them.

What can I do with traits?

Get responses with more context

When your users leave a response, their traits will get attached to the response. This gives you more information on the user attributes at the moment they leave their response.

Target surveys

In the Targeting section of the Survey Designer, you can select which users should see the survey. You can create a list of conditions based on user traits. Users will see the survey only if they meet all of the conditions.

Filter results on the Dashboard

In your SatisMeter dashboard, you can filter based on Text traits, which will give you a segmented view of the survey statistics and responses.

Which traits can I send?

You can send virtually any traits to SatisMeter. Which traits you send and their names and values are completely up to you.

Small reminder: if you're worried about sending your user's personal data, let us remind you that SatisMeter is GDPR compliant.

Traits types and format

SatisMeter normally expects traits to be of one of the next types:

Text - Simple text attributes like name, email, or gender. You can also pass URLs so you could pass attributes like website, avatar, or facebookProfile.
Date - Example: createdAt or birthday.
Number - Example: age or ltvPaid
Yes/No - Also known as true/false or boolean. Example: isPremiumUser

And this is what a collection of traits and their values could look like:

name: "John Doe"
email: "john_doe@example.com"
age: 33
createdAt: "2020-07-08T10:52:28+01:00"
isPremiumUSer: true

Important: Date traits are passed as text so in order for SatisMeter to know that it's a Date it must be in ISO-8601 format.

You should send traits with their name in medial capitals format (also known as camel case), but if you can not, SatisMeter will transform them automatically so in your dashboard or survey designer you'll see them in the proper format. Examples: createdAt will be shown as "Created At" and isPremiumUser as "Is Premium User".

How can I send user traits?

Every time your product or website loads the SatisMeter code to check whether the current user should see the survey, it is also sending user traits about the current user. This means that almost all ways of sending user traits are specific to how you installed SatisMeter.

Keep in mind that when you send user traits, SatisMeter will only update those traits that you're sending, and won't delete any trait sent earlier. That means that you don't have to send all traits every time.

In-app HTML snippet

If you installed the HTML snippet you copied and pasted a piece of code that contains something like this:

satismeter({
    writeKey: "YOUR_WRITE_KEY",
    userId: "1234",
    traits: {
      name: "John Doe",
      email: "john@doe.com",
      createdAt: "2020-06-08T07:56:44.242Z"
    }
  });

If you take a closer look at the code there's a traits field. That field contains the collection of traits that you'll send to SatisMeter. You can modify that to contain whatever traits you want and, as stated earlier, they will be sent when the survey is requested.

In-app Mobile

As with the HTML snippet, your installation code already contains all that's necessary to send traits. If want to send specific user traits, you will need to modify the HTML snippet in order to send those specific traits. Please refer to the SDK documentation to see a better example.

Segment

If you're using Segment you are already sending all your user traits. Every time you make an identify call Segment will send those user traits to SatisMeter.

This applies to both cloud and device mode.

SatisMeter API

You can send user traits by using the Insert/Update user endpoint from our REST API. This method is always available, regardless of how you installed SatisMeter. In fact, you don't even have to install it, the only thing you need to have is a SatisMeter project.

For more information on how to use the API, see the article Insert/Update user API