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Use your own Survey Tool
Use your own Survey Tool

When you need special question types or want to do advanced survey analysis, integrate your own survey tool with PlaytestCloud

Christian Ress avatar
Written by Christian Ress
Updated over a week ago

With PlaytestCloud's survey tools, you can create powerful surveys for every playtest, but using your own survey tool together with our playtests is possible as well. 

We support most survey tools, including Alchemer (formerly known as SurveyGizmo), SurveyMonkey, Question Pro and Limesurvey. The integration is not specific to these survey tools and we are happy to help you integrate PlaytestCloud with your favorite software.

Reach out to us about using your own survey tool by putting in a special request.

Integration Overview

In playtests that use surveys hosted by your own survey tool, we redirect players to your surveys whenever it's necessary for them to fill out a survey, for example after they have played for the required amount of time.

We need to track which players complete the surveys, so we pass tracking data along whenever our players access your surveys that your survey tool needs to send back to us. How that works is described in the integration section.

To give you background information on each player, we also pass the following data along for each player:

  • First name

  • Age

  • Gender

  • Nationality

  • Country of Residence 

  • Hours they play games per week

You can also find this information in the player profile section of your playtest videos. 

To avoid unnecessary data collection, it's required that you don't ask for personal data (email address, last name, address, ...) in your survey and prevent tracking of IP addresses, if possible.

Integration Steps

The specific steps to integrating your own survey tool with PlaytestCloud depend on the tool that you use.

Alchemer (formerly known as SurveyGizmo) Integration Guide

SurveyMonkey Integration Guide

Qualtrics Integration Guide

Typefrom Integration Guide

Forsta (formerly known as Decipher) Integration Guide

General Integration Guide

Each integration requires the following steps:

  1. Store the tracking information that PlaytestCloud passes when the player visits your survey

  2. Store the demographics information that PlaytestCloud passes when the player visits your survey

  3. Redirect the player back to PlaytestCloud upon survey completion, passing the tracking information along

Step 1 & 2: Store Tracking and Demographics Information

The tracking and demographics information is passed to your survey using URL variables. For example, a player called Mike, Age 37 from the US who plays for 10-20 hours per week would access your survey via this URL:

https://www.example.com/game-survey?age=37&country=United%20States&nationality=United%20States&first_name=Mike&firstname=Mike&gender=male&hours_playing_per_week=10-20&hoursplayingperweek=10-20&bucketid=1234&bucket_id=1234&participation_info=BAhJIhIyMzYwNjoxNzM3MDYzBjoGRVQ%3D--f197222adb6fe5196d6be1739cd48301fa7469c3&participationinfo=BAhJIhIyMzYwNjoxNzM3MDYzBjoGRVQ%3D--f197222adb6fe5196d6be1739cd48301fa7469c3


The URL variables for the demographics data are:

  • age: Tester's age (Number, e.g. 37) 

  • country: Tester's country of residence (Text, e.g. United Kingdom)

  • nationality: Tester's nationality (Text, Nationality is written like a country, e.g. Canada, not Canadian)

  • gender: Tester's gender (Text, either male, female, or other)

  • first_name: Tester's first name (Text, e.g. Mike)

  • firstname: Same as first_name, may be included for compatibility with survey tools that don't support underscores in variable names

  • hours_playing_per_week: Tester's estimate for their weekly playtime (Text, e.g.  10-20)

  • hoursplayingperweek: Same as hours_playing_per_week, may be included for compatibility with survey tools that don't support underscores in variable names

The following URL variables are for tracking and diagnosis purposes:

  • participation_id: Unique player identifier. We can use this to correlate survey responses with videos and players in our database. (It's strongly recommended that you track this value)

  • participationid: Same as participation_id, may be included for compatibility with survey tools that don't support underscores in variable names

  • participation_info: Tracking identifier used by PlaytestCloud to track which players completed the survey (Text, contains special characters and must not be modified)

  • participationinfo: Same as participation_info, may be included for compatibility with survey tools that don't support underscores in variable names

  • bucket_id: Internal identifier

  • bucketid: Same as bucket_id, may be included for compatibility with survey tools that don't support underscores in variable names 

Integrating your survey tool with PlaytestCloud is possible without using or storing any of the demographics URL variables. If you are considering asking players for data that is already passed through our URL variables, we suggest that you omit that question and use the already provided demographics data instead.

Step 3: Redirect Players to PlaytestCloud

Upon finishing the last page of your survey, redirect players back to PlaytestCloud and include the participation_info URL variable in the redirection URL.

Note: It's crucial that players are automatically redirected upon reaching the last page. Players must not be asked to press a button that isn't the Next Page or Submit Survey button. This is to avoid a situation where players think they're done with the survey (having seen the Thank You page) without PlaytestCloud being notified of this.

The URL players need to be redirected is to:

https://www.playtestcloud.com/process_steps/external_survey_complete?participation_info=[Content of participation_info] 

or, if your survey tool does not support underscores in URL variables 

https://www.playtestcloud.com/process_steps/external_survey_complete?participationinfo=[Content of participationinfo]

You must pass the content of the participation_info variable captured in Step 1 exactly, without modification.

Using the example shown in Step 1, the correct redirection URL is:

https://www.playtestcloud.com/process_steps/external_survey_complete?participation_info=BAhJIhIyMzYwNjoxNzM3MDYzBjoGRVQ%3D--f197222adb6fe5196d6be1739cd48301fa7469c3


Survey tools we do not support

We currently do not support survey tools that aren't able to pass variables to us when the player finishes the survey and is redirected to the success page, which is needed to track who filled out the survey. Google Forms is one such tool that is not supported.

Questions?

We can help! Send us a message and we'll help get your survey tool connected with PlaytestCloud.

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