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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• Understand How Metadata Works in User Profiles
• Configure Application Metadata