Pendo: Configuration Gotchas to Consider

Are you considering integrating Pendo into your organization, or are you in the midst of these challenges? Leveraging Pendo's powerful product analytics can transform the way you understand and engage with user data to make informed decisions. For product leaders and managers, mastering product analytics is imperative to achieve success in today's competitive market. Interested in exploring this together? Let's chat!

Intro

This is the third post in our series on Product Analytics Integration and Rollout Best Practices. As your engineers work on integrating the Pendo code snippet into your product's code base, there are a few noteworthy configuration settings to pay close attention to that we'd like to highlight today. Drawing from two years of experience working with a large client across 15 distinct development teams, this post aims to shed light on these potential gotchas and provide you with the insights needed to avoid them.

By proactively addressing potential gotchas related to CNAME configuration, CSP settings, and HTML identifiers, you can ensure a smoother integration process and maximize the benefits of using Pendo.

CNAME Considerations

One of Pendo's configurations allows teams to specify CNAME records in their DNS entries that use their company's or product's specific domain name, instead of Pendo's default hostnames (ie: pendo.io). This configuration is important because it allows Pendo's network activity (sending events, serving guides, etc) to flow through a known domain to customers who might have certain security capabilities like ad-blocking, firewalls, VPNs, filters, etc enabled. 

This is an important configuration to consider early because of the time and effort required to work with your IT team to review, approve, and configure DNS entries. Depending on your organization's size and your IT team's workload in the moment, this could cause delays in data flows between your product and Pendo.

To avoid delays and complications, it's best to kick off CNAME conversations as early as possible with your IT team. Provide them with all necessary information about why this configuration is essential to capturing data with Pendo for certain customers, and also reference Pendo's specific CNAME configuration documentation, which is well documented.

CSP Considerations

A Content Security Policy (CSP) helps engineering or IT teams prevent various security attacks on your product by controlling / restricting which resources can be loaded within a web application's set of pages. While CSPs are essential for managing security of your web product, they can sometimes interfere with third-party tools like Pendo, by preventing certain scripts/activities from running. 

A strict CSP can prevent Pendo's tagging designer and guides from functioning correctly within your product. This issue might surface across all of your environments, including development, testing, and staging, or it may only surface in production. 

To avoid the surprise of certain Pendo functionality not working as expected, it's important to engage engineering and/or IT leadership in a conversation about the implications of your current CSP settings on Pendo. Gaining the approval from these leaders and coordinating proper changes to the CSP as early as possible during the integration phase will save your team time diving into using Pendo's tagging and/or guides designers. Just like CNAME configuration above, Pendo's CSP configuration documentation is well documented. 

HTML Identifiers Considerations

Pendo offers configuration settings to include specific, custom HTML identifiers that are unique to your code base. Savvy teams will either build custom identifiers specific to product analytics use cases (recommended), or will leverage existing custom identifiers that they have reasonable confidence won't change even as frontend changes are made to the UI (for example, automation specific identifiers). By configuring Pendo to include these identifiers, tracking clicks on specific UI elements (Pendo's Feature Tags) for user engagement reporting becomes easier for the team. 

What happens if the team misses configuring Pendo to include these identifiers? For some UI that are not standard HTML elements, Pendo might not capture clicks or interactions. So Pendo might be missing out on certain user engagement activities for these non-standard UI elements UNTIL the team tells Pendo what custom identifiers to look for... This is one "data gap" issue that teams can encounter: there will not be historical events to use when defining Feature Tags until those specific identifiers are included in settings.

To avoid this issue, make sure to identify and add any custom identifiers to the Include list in Pendo settings. Regularly review and update this list to ensure that all relevant identifiers are captured. Collaborate with your development team to understand the identifiers they use and keep them informed about Pendo's requirements.

Conclusion

Pendo offers powerful configuration settings that can greatly enhance your product's user experience and data collection capabilities. However, overlooking or underestimating the importance of some of these settings can lead to delays and complications down the line. By proactively addressing potential gotchas related to CNAME configuration, CSP settings, and HTML identifiers, you can ensure a smoother integration process and maximize the benefits of using Pendo.