When a user submits a survey or form inside a Flow, Appcues automatically stores the response as a user property. You can then use that property in audience targeting rules for any experience — for example, showing a follow-up Flow only to users who gave a specific feature a bad rating, or targeting a Checklist at users who selected a specific onboarding goal.

Prerequisites

• A published Flow that contains a survey or form step collecting responses.
• At least one response submitted, so the auto-property exists in your account.

Add a label to your survey question

Labels control how Appcues names the auto-property created from responses. Without a label, Appcues generates an ID-based property name that's harder to find later.

1. Open the Flow in the Builder and select the survey or form step.
2. Click the survey block. An Add Label field appears above the block.
3. Enter the question text as the label — for example, How likely are you to recommend Democues to a colleague or friend?
4. Save and Publish the Flow.

Appcues creates a user property prefixed with "Form Response" and titled with your label text as soon as the first response comes in.

Target an experience using the response property

1. Open the experience you want to target (a Flow, Checklist, Banner, or any other experience type).
2. Go to the Audience section in the experience settings.
3. Add a condition and select User Property.
4. Start typing the label text from your survey question. The property appears with a Form Response prefix — for example, Form Response: How likely are you to recommend Democues to a colleague or friend?
5. Set the operator and value. Enter the value exactly as it appears in your survey — values are case-sensitive.
6. Save the targeting rules.

Confirm it worked

• Open Users in Studio and search for a user who submitted the survey.
• Check the user's profile for the Form Response property and verify it contains the expected value.
• On the targeted experience, open the Audience tab and confirm the user matches the targeting criteria.

Troubleshoot missing or hard-to-find properties

Property name is an auto-generated ID

If you added your question as a text block instead of using the Add Label field, Appcues generates the property name from an internal ID rather than your question text. The property still works, but it appears as something like _appcuesForm_abc123 instead of a readable name.

To find the correct property name:

1. Go to the Flow's Results page.
2. Export the survey CSV.
3. Check the column headers — the header for your question column is the property name to use in targeting.

Tip: To avoid this, edit the original survey step and add a label. New responses going forward will use the label-based property name. Existing responses under the old ID-based name remain unchanged.

Property doesn't appear in the targeting dropdown

• Confirm the Flow is published and at least one user has submitted a response. The property is created on first submission.
• Verify you're searching by the label text, not the full question from the text block.
• Check that the property wasn't renamed or deleted under Settings > Data > Properties.

Targeting rule isn't matching expected users

• Form response values are case-sensitive. Enter the value exactly as the user sees it in the survey (e.g., Very Satisfied, not very satisfied).
• For rating or NPS questions, the value is stored as a number. Use numeric operators like is greater than or is less than rather than text matching.
• Confirm the user actually submitted the survey — check their profile for the property.

Still stuck?

Collect the following and contact support:

• The Flow URL from Studio (copy from your browser's address bar).
• The affected user's User ID.
• The property name you're searching for.
• A screenshot of the targeting rules you've configured.

Common issues

If you've added your question as a block of text instead of as a label, the property will be auto-generated by Appcues based on an id. This makes this just slightly harder to find when using it to target other experiences. 

If you do the above, the property will show up formatted like the below and you will need to export your survey's CSV to find the id that was generated for your question.

If you have any questions, reach out to support@appcues.com and we're happy to help!