Understand How Progressive Profiling Works
Progressive profiling is the process used to collect additional information about your users over time as they engage with your website or application. You can gather detailed user information only when relevant to a user's activities. Progressive profiling enhances your users' experience by not asking them too many questions at signup.
For example, you might collect the user's name, email, and password on initial signup, then at their next login, you might ask for the name of their company and their job title. We recommend that when you ask users for additional information, try to avoid asking for information that you may already have. For example, if a user signs up using a social network, you may already have some of the information from the identity provider.
Benefits of using progressive profiling
Progressive profiling provides the following benefits:
Shorter registration forms
Higher conversion rates
Collecting more relevant information about your users
Enhancing the user experience by avoiding repetitious questions
How it works
Every time a user authenticates through Auth0, Auth0 updates their user profile. The updated data can come from different sources:
Properties supplied by the identity provider (such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or any connection).
Attributes that are dynamically created in Auth0 Rules.
Attributes obtained by calling APIs such as FullContact and Clearbit.
Application-specific attributes that developers can collect in their apps and save.
Use action triggers
With the post-login
action trigger, you can modify user_metadata
and app_metadata
as part of a user’s login flow. This is useful for tasks such as storing application-specific data on the user profile, recording whether or not specific operations have occurred for a user, or caching the results of expensive operations on the User profile so they can be re-used in future logins. To learn more, read Manage User Metadata with the post-login Action Trigger.
Use rules
You can use Auth0 rules to redirect users to a page used to collect more information than was given at the initial signup. To learn more, read Redirect Users from Within Rules and Manage Metadata with Rules.
Use the Management API
You can use the Auth0 Management API /
Users/patch_users_by_id
endpoint to update the profile of any authenticated user with certain information including app_metadata
and user_metadata
. To learn more, read Manage Metadata Using the Management API.
Use the Lock library
You can use additionalSignUpFields
to add custom fields to user sign-up forms. When a user adds data in a custom field, Auth0 stores entered values in that user's user_metadata
. To learn more about adding user_metadata
on signup, read Additional Signup Fields.