Embedded Data

About Embedded Data

Embedded data is any extra information you would like recorded in your survey data in addition to the question responses. It can be used to store information such as:

• Demographics and other information you knew about respondents beforehand and saved in the contact list.
• The social media site a respondent came from.
• The condition a respondent was assigned to in a research study.

Embedded data consists of a field and a value. The field is the name of your variable (e.g., Gender, State, Age). The value is what your field will be set to in your data. Just as one question can have multiple possible answers, an embedded data field can have multiple possible values (e.g., a field called Country might have a value of United States, Mexico, or Canada).

The value for your embedded data field can be pulled from data that you have uploaded into a contact list, information appended to the respondent’s survey link, built-in fields provided by Qualtrics, or values set in the survey flow.

Using Embedded Data in Your Survey

Once embedded data has been added to your survey, it can be used in a number of ways, including:

• Piped text to display embedded data in your survey questions.
• Branch logic to determine what sections of a survey your respondent should take.
• Display logic to determine whether a respondent should see a question.
• Quotas to determine whether someone meets the conditions required to increment them.
• Email tasks and email triggers to determine whether an email should be automatically sent upon completion of a survey.
• Contact list triggers to determine whether a survey taker should be added to a contact list.
• Salesforce extension to help the system decide what to communicate with Salesforce.
• Data & Analysis and Reports as part of your analysis.

Creating an Embedded Data Element

1. From the Survey tab, click Survey flow.
   
2. Click Add a New Element Here.
   Qtip: Is there an element you want to place your embedded data under? Click Add Below on that element.
3. Choose Embedded Data.
4. Click Create New Field or Choose From Dropdown and type your field name, or select an existing field from the dropdown.
   
   Qtip: Try to avoid special characters like emojis, periods (.), and hashtags (#) when naming your embedded data. In addition, the field name RID (or rid) is a reserved Qualtrics field used for back-end platform processes; you should never give any of your embedded data fields this name.
5. If desired, set a value by clicking on the blue Set A Value Now text.
   
6. If desired, click Add a New Field to add multiple fields to the element.
   Qtip: If you’re not happy with where your embedded data element is, click Move and hold it to drag the element somewhere else in the flow.

Choose From Dropdown

When naming embedded data, click the blue dropdown arrow to see additional built-in options.

• Survey Metadata: This option includes a number of embedded data built into Qualtrics. See the linked section for more details on what this includes.
• Add from Contacts: Add one of the embedded data that you have saved in your contact list. See this section to learn how to pull in every one of those embedded data at the same time.
• Existing Embedded Data: This allows you to select embedded data that’s already in your survey flow. For example, if two different branches gets two different values of the same embedded data. This is incredibly useful for avoiding typos, and thus making sure all the data is saved in the same field.

Embedded Data Options

Embedded data options allow you to determine which embedded data are eligible for text analysis, as well as change each embedded data’s variable type.

If you’re interested in breaking out your reports by participant age or you need to assign multiple departments to one person based on an embedded data variable, you may have to change the variable type. Changing the variable type of your embedded data can allow for more flexible ways to record your data.

1. Click on Options on the lower-right corner of your embedded data element.
   
2. For each embedded data field, choose a variable type from the dropdown. See our section below for a full explanation of each variable type.
   
3. If the variable type is Text Type, you can also select Analyze Text to include the embedded data in text analysis.
4. Click OK.

Embedded Data Variable Types

1. Text Set: This variable allows for discrete values containing letters, numbers, or special characters. Only one value can be assigned for a Text Set variable at a time. This feature works well with breakouts on reports.
2. Multi-Value Text Set: This variable works similar to the Text Set, but it allows multiple, comma-separated values to be assigned instead of just one at a time.
3. Number: This is a continuous variable type. Values must be in numeric format, and reports can determine both statistical values and counts of individual answers given. For example, you can use a Number embedded data to calculate average age, but also to create a table showing how many 18 year olds were in your study. This type is not compatible with breakouts.
4. Number Set: This is an ordinal variable. Values must be in numeric format and can be used as discrete values to find counts or perform Breakouts.
5. Text: Since this is the default variable type, the label is often omitted from the embedded data element. This kind of variable is compatible with text-specific reporting visualizations, such as paginated tables and word clouds. It can also be analyzed with the Text iQ feature, but only if you select Analyze Text when creating it (see steps above).
   
6. Date: When values are recorded in YYYY-MM-DD format, this variable type allows you to access special filters based on timeframe.

   Qtip: In order for the date to properly display when using the Date embedded data field, be sure the date is in one of the following formats:

   • YYYY-MM-DD
   • YYYYMMDD
   • YYYYMMDD:HHMMSS
   • YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
   • YYYY-MM-DD’T’HH:MM:SS.sss’Z’
7. Filter Only: This type of variable is similar to a Text Set type, but allows you to filter your data by text contained within the values, not just exact values and emptiness. For example, you can filter by all departments containing “Sales” in the name, not just Sales.

Setting Values in the Survey Flow

Often the value of your embedded data is stored outside the survey, such as in a contacts list or appended to the end of the respondent’s survey link. However, you can also set the value manually in the survey flow.

 Every respondent who meets this branch condition will have their response flagged with an embedded data field called Consent set to a value of True.

To set a value in the Survey Flow

1. Add an embedded data element to your Survey flow.
   
2. Click Enter Embedded Data Field Name Here and type your field name.
3. Click Set a Value Now.
   
4. Enter the appropriate value or click the blue dropdown to insert piped text.
   
   Qtip: Using piped text as your embedded data value allows that value to dynamically change for each respondent based on their question responses or other criteria.
5. Click Apply when you’re finished.
   

Setting Values from a Mailing List

A mailing list is a mailing list used for distributing surveys many ways on Qualtrics, including email, personal links, and SMS distributions (text messages). In addition to including names and email addresses for each recipient on this list, you can include any demographic or unique data you’d like in a mailing list. For example, in addition to name and email, the mailing list in the screenshot below includes the embedded data fields Position, State, and Project Number. All we had to do to include this information in the contact list was add those columns of data to our contact file before we imported it.

However, just because the embedded data is in our contact list doesn’t mean it’s automatically included in the survey data. By adding an embedded data element in your survey flow, you can have this information saved in your results for use in your analysis.

To include information from your contact list in your survey data

1. Add an embedded data element to your Survey flow.
   
   Qtip: Though this element can be placed anywhere in the survey flow, it is best practice to put these embedded data elements at the beginning of your survey.
2. Click Add From Contacts.
   
3. Select the contact list you’d like to pull embedded data from and click OK.
   
4. Add any other embedded data fields by clicking Add a New Field and typing your field name.
   

Setting Values from the Survey URL

If you’re not distributing your survey to a contact list, you can still bring embedded data into the survey for each respondent by adding your embedded data field names and values to the end of the survey link.

Let’s pretend we are preparing two versions of our anonymous link: one that indicates the respondent’s source is Facebook and one that indicates the source is Twitter. These anonymous links will take respondents to the same survey – the only difference is the social media “Source” added to the end. When ready to distribute, we’d only post the Facebook link on Facebook and the Twitter link on Twitter. When a respondent accesses the survey link, Qualtrics will read their survey link and know which “Source”  the respondent came from.

Embedded data can be added to any kind of survey link, and you can add many different embedded data to one link. To learn more with step-by-step instructions, see the Passing Information via Query Strings support page.

Setting Values with Built-in Embedded Data Fields

In addition to creating your own embedded data variables or pulling them in from other sources, you also have access to some built-in variables that Qualtrics records for every response. These elements can be added to the survey flow before or after you have collected responses by using the steps described in the Creating an Embedded Data Element section. You won’t need to set a value when you use these fields, because each one performs a special function in the responses (described below) and uses this to determine the value. Note that because of this, you will be unable to set custom values for these fields in the survey flow.

The following built-in embedded data fields can be added to your survey:

Setting Values from Other Sources

In addition to using embedded data from a contact list or in the survey link URL, you can also pull embedded data from other sources.

Embedded Data in a Web Service

A web service allows you to pull data from an external website into your survey. For example, you might want to pull in today’s top headline from CNN or customer details from your own internal database. Information drawn from a web service is saved as embedded data. For an in-depth look at using a web service to draw embedded data from another website, refer to our Web Service page.

Embedded Data with Salesforce

If your Qualtrics account includes the Salesforce extension, you can pull embedded data into your survey from Salesforce using the trigger and email Survey feature.

Embedded Data in Website Feedback

See Embedded Data with Website Feedback.

Embedded Data in XM Directory

The behavior of embedded data in XM Directory is almost exactly the same as what’s described on this page. One of the key differences, though, is the ability to manage embedded data on a directory level. See Manage Embedded Data & Refresh Embedded Data for more details.

Transactional Data

Transactions allow you to record interaction data about events associated with your contacts by representing a specific interaction at a specific moment in time. You can set survey embedded data based on transaction data.

1. Add an embedded data element to your Survey flow.
   
   Qtip: Though this element can be placed anywhere in the survey flow, it is best practice to put these embedded data elements at the beginning of your survey.
2. Where it says Enter Embedded Data Field Name Here, type out the name of your transactional field.
   Qtip: You may not be able to select this field from the list of existing fields. Make sure you type the name of the field exactly the same way it appears in your directory, including the same spelling, spacing, punctuation, and capitalization.
3. Do not set a value. This allows the data to be pulled from the contact list.

Removing Embedded Data

In this section, we will cover several ways to remove embedded data. Please pay careful attention to the warnings associated with each of the following instructions.

Removing Embedded Data Fields

You can delete entire embedded data fields inside the survey flow. This means removing the field itself and all data associated with it.

To delete all embedded data in an element, click Delete in the lower-right of an element.

You can also delete one field from an element at a time. In the example below, we want to delete City, but not Neighborhood.

1. Click onto the name of the field you want to delete.
   
2. Delete the field name by clicking the Delete or Backspace key on your keyboard. This field should turn red if it’s completely empty.
   
3. Click out of the field.
   
4. Click Apply.

Removing One Respondent’s Embedded Data

If you need to remove just one respondent’s embedded data value (or replace it with a new value), you should edit the response in Data & Analysis.

1. Use filters or the page navigation to find the respondent you need to edit.
   
2. Choose to display the embedded data column you need to edit.
3. Click Edit.
   
4. Click the field to erase or rewrite the embedded data value.

Best Practices and Troubleshooting Embedded Data

Naming Fields

• Names should never exceed 200 characters.
• Avoid special characters like emojis, periods (.), dollar signs ($), and hashtags (#) when naming your embedded data .
• When referring back to the same field, make sure you use the same spelling, capitalization, spacing, and special characters throughout Qualtrics. For example, if you build the contact list using Home Address as the embedded data that stores your contacts’ address, don’t use HomeAddress or just Address in the survey flow.
• If you plan on using query strings, either remove spaces in the names and values of the embedded data you use, or use underscores to prevent yourself from needing to encode spaces in the URL. For example, StoreID and Store_ID can be easier to use with a query string than Store ID.
  Qtip: If your field names or values do have spaces, make sure to use a URL encoder, like this one.
• If your list of embedded data gets long or involves a complex naming system, keep a document somewhere with a list of all your embedded data and what they’re for. That way you can always double-check for spelling, capitalization, and spaces, in addition to the purpose of the field. These documents can also help you, any colleagues you are working with, and any customer support representative you work with troubleshoot when you have questions.
• Don’t name your fields the following:
  •  SID
  •  RID
  •  Auditable
  •  EndDate
  •  IPAddress
  •  RecordedDate
  •  StartDate
  • Status

Setting Values

• Each value of an embedded data field should never exceed 20KB (20,000 bytes). The amount of bytes in a given character depends on the character. For example, characters in English are 1 byte, while characters in other languages such as Chinese or Hebrew can take up multiple bytes per character. If you are unsure if you may hit this limit, use a byte counter to see how many bytes make up your embedded data value.
• If you are using built-in embedded data fields, you can save the fields in a survey flow embedded data element, as shown below. However, you cannot set values for these fields, because the way respondents complete the survey will determine those fields’ values.
  
• If you are using math operations in your survey, set them in an embedded data field so the results are saved with your survey data, like this:
  
• If you are using Piped Text to present a random number to a respondent, set this in an embedded data field so the results are saved with your survey data. See the Assigning Randomized IDs to Respondents support page.
  

Example: Counters
Let’s say that you would like to append values to track certain users. This is called a counter. Counters are often used when you have many branches that respondents can enter. To count the total number of branches through which a respondent passes, each branch has a counter underneath it. Ensure that all counters have the same field name for this setup to properly work. If you have [field name] = [field name] + 1, and that value is set multiple times in your survey flow using math operations, your value won’t be overwritten. In this case, the field will actually increment or grow during the course of the survey.

In this example, “Test_Value” will equal 2 when the respondent submits the survey because we used a Counter, the math operation of $e{ e://Field/Test_Value + 1 }, to increment “Test_Value” up by 1.

Arranging Elements in the Survey Flow

Do you ever wonder where your embedded data element is supposed to be in the survey flow? Here are some tips:

• Does the value of the embedded data field rely on the respondent answering certain questions? Make sure the embedded data element comes after the block that contains those questions.
• Are you setting different values for your embedded data depending on different conditions in your survey flow? If so, make sure that you pay attention to whether fields are indented properly to ensure that your values won’t overwrite each other.
  Example: For example, in this survey flow, even if a respondent has a Snack embedded data field that is initially set to Good, the value will be overwritten as Bad because the second embedded data is not nested under the branch logic correctly.
  
• Does the value of the embedded data change display or branch logic in the survey? (In other words, is the respondent’s survey content reliant on the value of this embedded data?) Make sure the embedded data element appears above the blocks where different paths take place.

FAQs