Google Forms prefilled link: entry IDs, bulk links and hidden fields

A prefilled link looks like this: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/FORM_ID/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.1234567890=Jane&entry.2345678901=Order+1042. The usp=pp_url part marks it as a prefilled URL. Each entry.<number> is one question, and the number is that question's internal ID, which stays the same when you edit the question text.

To find the ID for a question, prefill it with a distinctive word and look for that word in the link. The entry number just before it is the one you need. Write the IDs down next to the question titles, because they are the only mapping between your spreadsheet columns and the form.

Short answer and paragraph take any text. Multiple choice, dropdown and linear scale take the option text (or the number, for a scale), and the value has to match an option exactly, including capitals and spacing, or nothing is selected. Checkboxes repeat the same parameter once per ticked box: entry.111=Red&entry.111=Blue.

Dates come out in year-month-day order (entry.333=2026-10-15) regardless of how your locale displays them. For anything unusual, such as an "Other" option or a time question, don't guess the format: prefill it once with Google's tool and copy the exact parameters it produces. File upload questions can't be prefilled.

Put one row per person in a sheet: name in column A, email in column B, order number in column C. Keep your base link, everything up to and including usp=pp_url, in a single cell, say F1, so you only have to change it in one place.

Then build each link with a formula and fill it down. ENCODEURL matters: without it, a name like "Ali & Sons" breaks the link at the ampersand, and a plus sign turns into a space. Google's help page describes ENCODEURL as encoding text "for the purpose of using in a URL query", which is exactly this job.

Not natively. Every prefilled answer is a normal question that the respondent can see, change or delete before submitting. There is no setting that hides a question while still recording its value.

Two workarounds circulate. The first is to put the tracking question in its own section and use "Go to section based on answer" or the section's "After section" setting so respondents jump past it. It sounds right, and it is still repeated in tutorials, but it has a known problem: answers in sections the respondent never visits are not submitted. In a 2020 Apps Script community thread about exactly this setup, the reported result was that the prefilled value came back blank, and Nerdy Form's current guide warns about the same limitation. If you try it, submit a real test response and check the sheet before relying on it.

The second workaround is honest rather than hidden: put the question on the last page, label it clearly ("Reference code, please leave as is"), and accept that it is visible. It works, and the value arrives. It is also trivial to edit.

Anything in a URL can be changed by whoever has the URL. A respondent can edit entry.2222222222=Order+1042 to another order number, forward their personal link to a colleague, or strip the tracking values out entirely. Treat a prefilled ID as a hint that saves typing, not as proof of who responded. If identity matters, match on something the respondent must know, or use sign-in.

Privacy cuts the other way. A personal link with a name and email in plain text ends up in browser history, email archives, analytics tools and any page the respondent shares it on. Prefill an opaque reference (a random code you can look up in your sheet) rather than personal data, and never put anything sensitive in the URL.

Only indirectly. Google Forms reads entry.<id> parameters and ignores the rest, so a link ending in ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=october is logged nowhere in your responses. There is also no field in Google Forms for a Google Analytics or Tag Manager ID, so you can't see the campaign in GA either.

The workable approach is to translate: create a short-answer question such as "Source", find its entry ID, and publish one prefilled link per channel, for example entry.4444444444=newsletter for the email and entry.4444444444=linkedin for the social post. You can build those channel links in the same sheet, or tag your landing pages with our free UTM builder at /tools/utm-builder and then map each campaign to a prefilled form link.

The limits are the ones above: the source question is visible and editable, a skipped section may drop it, and a person who arrives on your site first and then clicks a plain form link brings no source at all. If attribution matters, you need a form that reads utm_* parameters into real hidden fields. Our guide to capturing UTM parameters in forms (/blog/utm-tracking-forms) covers first-touch versus last-touch storage and embed pitfalls in detail.

Zunoform does both jobs separately. Visible questions can be prefilled from the URL by their field ID or by their question text (?company=Acme fills a question titled Company), and each question can also have a named "Prefill from URL parameter" in the field editor. Hidden fields are a different thing: you declare names such as utm_source in Settings, the respondent never sees them, and the values are saved with the response on every plan, including Free.

Those hidden values appear in the response view, the CSV export, and deliveries: webhooks and Zapier catch hooks get them as a hidden object, and Google Sheets and Excel add one column per hidden field. Our embed script also forwards the host page's query string into the form. The honest gaps: the native HubSpot and Mailchimp integrations don't map hidden fields, so CRM attribution goes through Zapier or a webhook, and Free is capped at 500 responses a month where Google Forms is unlimited. If visible prefilled answers are all you need, Google Forms is fine and free.