How to Prepopulate Google Forms using UTM parameters

A while ago, I was involved in a project in which we were sending surveys to people who had visited a site, to ask them about their experience. Those surveys were in Google forms.

To increase my response rate, I wanted to work out how to prepopulate some info in the forms.

The process for sending the Google form survey would be

• Visitor checks in to site with their phone number:
• We text a survey to their phone number:
• To identify them, we ask them for their phone number in the survey

That’s right, we asked them for information we already knew. I hate being asked for the same information twice. The fact that we were doing this drove me crazy.

At the time, we were using Google Forms. Google Forms is a pretty basic data entry mechanism.

So I wondered: How can I prepopulate the Google form with the phone number information? Here’s how I figured it out.

Overview of How to Prepopulate Google Forms

Say you want to send the above form. How can you pre-fill phone number? (You can’t pre-fill email.)

The general process is that you

1. Write the survey
2. Get a pre-filled link to the survey, and then
3. Use the link it generates, and modify the UTM parameters as needed.

Step 1: Get a Pre-filled Link to the Google Form

In your Google Form, go to the right hand side menu button and click on ‘Get a Pre-filled link’.

This opens up a new tab with a URL ending in /prefill (like https://docs.google.com/forms/d/fakeformURL/prefill)

An instruction at the bottom reads “Pre-fill responses, then click ‘Get link'”.

You then get a button at the bottom asking you “Share this link to include pre-filled responses”. What link? Nothing in the browser changed!

Click on “Copy link” and you get it.

Here’s the link I got: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/XYZVERYLONGFORMCODE12345/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.1335037241=555-fake-1234

Let’s break this URL down:

• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/<code>XYZVERYLONGFORMCODE12345/viewform – this is part one of the link. It’s going to remain the same for every link you send out.
• ?usp=pp_url – this is the first UTM parameter. I believe this is for pre-filled responses. Whatever. It’s not important. Just include it.
• &entry.1335037241=555-fake-1234 – This is the critical second UTM parameter. It contains a code for the entry in that form, plus the data.

Every time you build a custom prepopulated form URL, you have to change the data for that UTM code.

Important: If you change the field by removing it and adding a new one, you have to change the code for that entry. Also, if you modify the text, the code remains the same.

Step 2: Use the entry codes to prepopulate

Now, you can prepopulate your form by modifying the information in the second UTM parameter.

For example, to send the number “555-fake-9876” to that form, you’d send the URL https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/XYZVERYLONGFORMCODE12345/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.1335037241=<strong>555-fake-9876</strong>.

If you have multiple parameters, then you change the code for each one.

That’s it!