When you're showing an Appcues flow to your users, you'll sometimes want to send them to a particular URL. Oftentimes, this URL will be the same for all your users—perhaps a path like /user/settings. Other times, you may want to send the user to a URL unique to them or a subgroup of users—say /user/12345/profile. 

But how do you set that up within Appcues so that different users are sent to different URLs, all from within the same flow? That's where personalizing the redirect URL comes in! By adding a user attribute into the settings of a redirect step, you can create a dynamic URL pattern that will be personalized to each user. 

Let's take a look at how to set this up.

Build Guide

Step 1: Create a new flow

Create a new flow. In this example, we're creating a flow that begins on the Appcues documentation home page, guides the user to their favorite doc, and then asks them for feedback about it.

Step 2: Add the navigation step and personalize the URL

While building your flow, add a redirect step by navigating to the page where you would like to send the user and re-entering build mode. This will create a navigation step that should be set to the Redirect action by default. 

In the Redirect to URL field, change the dynamic part of the URL from the specific value to the user attribute that will be used to auto-fill this field when the flow is live. In our example flow, we're using a profile attribute called favorite-doc that contains the specific URL path for a given user's favorite documentation page.

This will cause a new field, Build URL, to populate. The Build URL is the original specific URL of the navigation step and is how the Builder knows where to build the following steps. This URL generally remains unchanged.

Once you've made those changes, be sure to save the changes on that step!

Step 3: Ensure the property has been added to your Appcues installation

For this to work properly, you'll want to ensure that the user property being used in this redirect step has been passed into Appcues for every user that will see this flow. This is commonly done in the Appcues.identify() call of your Appcues installation, but can also be done with alternate methods such as from custom button clicks or via our public API. 

Step 4: Test it live

Publish the flow live with any pertinent page and audience targeting conditions. In order to test the personalization, this will need to be tested as a live flow, following the steps in our testing documentation.

If the property has been passed in during your current session through the Appcues.identify() call, you can verify it has the value you expect by expanding the user details in the Appcues debugger.