Progressive profiling is a powerful feature used to reduce the length of forms by hiding all the fields which are already known. This will prevent your contacts from feeling overwhelmed by massive forms and will even reduce the time it takes to fill out a form if fields are already known to your Adaptix instance and thus are hidden for the contact.
Configuration
There are two ways to configure a form field to only display when the asked values are unknown.
First, choose the form that you want to use for progressive profiling. Go to the form fields and open the field configuration of the field you want to use for progressive profiling. Change to the Behavior tab, here you can configure the behaviour of the fields.
Note: We recommend to always use the email field, even though it might already be known, because Adaptix uses the email as a unique identifier for contacts. Also the submit button field must be always visible because otherwise the form can not be submitted by the contact.
1. Show when value exists
If this option is set to “No”, Adaptix checks if the value for this field exists in the database or if the value was provided in a former form submission already. If a value is found, the field won’t be displayed in the form. If this option is set to “Yes”, Adaptix will show the field, regardless whether a value is found or not. The default configuration for this option is “Yes”.
2. Display field only after X submissions.
If you have a form that you would like to use multiple times, with more fields occurring the more times a contact fills it out, while still only using a single form, the option “Display field only after X submissions” is what you are looking for. As the name already states, the field will only appear once the form hast been submitted X times. This goes hand in hand very well with the ability to hide fields if the value is already known.
For example: A form asks for the email, first and last name of a contact on the first time it is filled out and when the contacts fills out the form a second time, the first and the last name fields will be hidden and instead contact will be asked to fill in their company and phone.
Limits of Progressive Profiling
The search history limit
Adaptix forms which do not use progressive profiling are as fast as they can be. The HTML of the form is rendered once, stored and this “cached” HTML is used for the next form load. When a progressive profiling configuration is turned on for any of the form fields, the form HTML might be different for each contact. It can even change for each contact after each submission. The impact of this is that form-caching cannot be used, and the form load time will be slower for a progressive profiling forms.
There also is a limit of 200 submissions from which Adaptix searches for existing form values. This limit was added to prevent possible long form loading times – or even hitting the server time or memory limits – when a contact has several thousand form submissions. This limit might cause Adaptix to display/hide the wrong fields if the contact exceeds this limit.
The embed type limit
Progressive Profiling forms will not work if you embed your form as static HTML. It will work at form preview, form public page, form embedded via JS, form embedded via iframe.
The kiosk mode limit
Progressive Profiling features are turned off if you switch the form to the Kiosk Mode. The form always creates a new contact on each submission in the Kiosk Mode. It doesn’t track the device from which the form was submitted.
