Sharing Forms | Sharing a form publicly - Zoho Forms

Sharing a form publicly

Table of Contents
  1. Sharing form link
  2. Sharing form as a QR Code
  3. Sharing forms on social media
  4. Track referrals
After creating your forms, you can share them as links anywhere on the web or social media and collect responses. The publicly accessible URL of a form, called a permalink, is unique to each form. Anyone with this link can access your form and submit an entry.

Share form publicly

To restrict the access of a form based on dates, number of responses, etc, check out the form restriction settings.
Once you've shared the form, you can track your form entries with the help of referral parameters. 
To get your form's permalink,
  1. In your form builder, click the Share tab.
  2. Under Share With, click Public (which is opened by default when you click the share tab).
  3. Copy the link under Form Permalink (URL) and share it with your audience.
  4. Shorten URL: If you'd like to shorten the permalink URL before distributing the link to the public, you can use the Shorten URL option. The shortened URL will be generated below your form's permalink, and you can use this link to receive form submissions. Shortened links are especially helpful when sharing forms in social media posts and other places with character limits.
    Shortened URL

  5. You can choose to disable the public link at any time using the toggle in the top-right corner.

    Form Public Link

Note:

  • The Shorten URL option is available only in our paid plans.
  • If the public URL of a form is disabled, the form will no longer be accessible through links shared via any medium (direct link, social media sharing, email campaigns), or any embed codes used in the web pages.
  • Once the public link of a form is disabled, submitting new entries and Save/Update actions will no longer be allowed.The saved links of a form to resume submissions later will also be disabled.

Sharing form as a QR Code

This option allows you to share your form as a QR code with your respondents either on your web page or as a printed copy. 
To generate and download the QR code,
  1. In your form builder, go to Share > Public > QR Code.
  2. Click Download to get the QR code. The QR code generated will be in .png format.

    QR Code

  3. The downloaded image can be embedded in your website or shared directly with your respondents.

Customize the QR Code

You can customize the QR code with your brand logo before you download it. To do so,
  1. Click Customize near the download button.
  2. In the Custom QR Code pop-up, upload your logo. The Preview shows how the QR code will look.

    Customize QR Code

  3. Click Generate QR Code.
  4. In the Customized QR Code pop-up, click Download to save the QR code with your logo.
Notes
Note: Zoho Forms doesn’t save the customized QR code. The QR Code section always shows the standard form QR code. To get a customized version again, repeat these steps and download it.

Sharing forms on social media

Share form on social media

You can circulate your form's permalink URL on social media instantly by clicking the social media icons. Zoho Forms has shortcuts to share your form on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 
Share form on social media

To share your form on other platforms, you can use the form's permalink URL. 

Track referrals

To know where your respondents found your form's permalink URL and submitted a response, you can use a tracking parameter  ?referrername=<referralwebsite> at the end of your form's permalink URL. You can enter a unique referrername for each source where you share your form. 

This way you will know where most of your traffic is originating from.

Tracking Referrals
Example:
If you are sharing your form's permalink URL on Twitter and Facebook, you can add a referrer name as shown below while sharing.

For Facebook:
https://forms.zohopublic.com/zylker/form/ContentMarketingWorkshop/formperma/136dhmA8E00j0G216Ag44kF9d ?referrername=facebook

For Twitter: 
https://forms.zohopublic.com/zylker/form/ContentMarketingWorkshop/formperma/136dhmA8E00j0G216Ag44kF9d ?referrername=twitter

Tracking Results

To see the tracking results, click All Entries. You can find a column titled Referrer Name . Here, you can filter your form entries based on the referrer name you have defined. 

Info
The referrer name is a simple option used to track the source from where your entries came from. To use advanced UTM tracking parameters for your marketing campaign, check out UTM Tracking in Zoho Forms.