When you’re recruiting participants—whether through a panel, email list, or social media—you’ll be sharing an Outset URL. There are two types of links you’ll see in your Outset study: a Shareable Survey Link and an Individual Interview URL. Each plays a different role in managing your interviews.
Let’s walk through what they are and when to use each!
For a guide on working with your third party panel, please refer to How To: Working with Third Party Panels.
What are the links used in Outset Studies?
Before we get into details about how to customize links, there are two types of links used in Outset studies.
Shareable Survey Link
This is the main link used to distribute your study to participants. It’s found under Recruit > Recruit on my own in your Outset study dashboard.
It looks like this:
https://api.outset.ai/interviews/public-surveys/{StudyID}/start
The
{StudyID}is unique to your study.This link never expires and can be shared widely (e.g., through a panel or newsletter).
Every time someone clicks this link, Outset creates a new, unique interview session for them.
Use this link when you’re recruiting participants yourself or through a third-party panel.
💡 Tip: This link will only work once your study is Live in Outset.
Individual Interview URL
After a participant clicks the Shareable Survey Link, Outset generates an Individual Interview URL tied to that specific participant and session.
It looks like this:
https://outset.ai/interview/{InterviewID}/voice
The
{InterviewID}refers to a specific interview session.This link should not be shared publicly—it’s only for the individual participant!
It expires after 24 hours if the participant doesn’t complete the interview.
Which link do you share to distribute your study?
To distribute your study, use the Shareable Survey Link found under Recruit > Recruit on my own > Shareable link. This is the link to provide to your third party panel or your list of participants to route them to your Outset study.
Once they click on this link, a unique Individual Interview URL (described above) tied to that specific interview session and participant will be generated.
Note: This Shareable link will only be active when your study is Live in Outset!
For more details on how to work with third party panels, please read more here: How To: Working with Third Party Panels.
Common Questions
What happens if someone clicks the link but doesn’t finish the interview?
If a participant starts but doesn’t finish, and later clicks the Shareable Survey Link again, they’ll start a new session from scratch. Their original link will have expired after 24 hours. Read more at this article: Can participants pause and re-start an interview later?
What does it mean if a participant sees an “expired link” message?
This usually means they’re trying to return to their personal Interview URL after the 24-hour window has passed. In that case, they should use the Shareable Survey Link to start fresh.
Help! My links still aren't working!
If you're testing your links and you're still not able to pass data through to the completion URL as expected, there are a couple things that we most commonly see as the root cause:
Confirm that the participant metadata that you're passing in via the customized shareable link is being recorded in your test interview. If so, then you'll be able to see the participant metadata on your Results tab, with the variable names recorded (e.g., here, the variable names passed in are iid and Category). If that information is not showing in the metadata column, then something is going wrong with your link on the way into Outset.
If your metadata is recorded properly, but you aren't routing to the completion URL appropriately, check that your variable names when you're passing data in are the same as the variable names when you're passing data out
Check that the completion URL is using one curly brace {INFO} rather than two {{INFO}} or brackets [INFO]
Hope this helps! If you have any further questions, please reach out to our team at [email protected] or via chat.