Pendo, Product Managers, and Metadata Design

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!

In today's fast-paced digital world, it's imperative that product managers are a part of any product analytics design/implementation efforts to ensure that the specific data tracked in Pendo is actually going to help them make data-informed decisions.

Introduction 

Welcome to the next chapter in our blog series, where we transition from the technical nitty-gritty of integrating Pendo to the crucial planning and oversight considerations for Product Managers and the product analytics reporting that will meet their needs. In today's fast-paced digital world, it's imperative that product managers are a part of any product analytics design/implementation efforts to ensure that the specific data tracked in Pendo is actually going to help them make data-informed decisions. This post focuses on metadata design, a key aspect that can make or break the effectiveness of your Pendo integration. 

Why Metadata Matters

Pendo has several important metadata capture and tracking capabilities of which Product Managers should be aware. In this post, we use "metadata" as an broad term that refers to Pendo's Visitor and Account attributes, its page / session context augmentation to URLs from its LocationAPI call, and event and custom properties. As you can see, there are many ways to pass "metadata" to Pendo that should be considered. 

But why does this matter, especially to Product Managers? These elements enable robust segmentation and filtering, making life easier for those creating reports, planning targeted guides, and more. Getting metadata right from the start is crucial because retrofitting it later can be a time-consuming process, often resulting in weeks of setbacks in reporting insights.

Visitor and Account Metadata Design

Product Managers should have a comprehensive understanding of their customers. This knowledge is vital for defining what attributes about specific users or their companies will be needed for detailed reporting. Pendo's Visitor and Account attributes are populated at initialization and/or when specific update calls are made throughout a user session.

Questions to Consider
1. What customer segments using my product matter most? How might these segments be represented in code that could be used to feed Pendo?
2. How will I want to filter or segment my reporting on my product? How will leadership want to see the reporting?
3. Are there already defined user attributes that we track for our product that can be ported into Pendo?

Once you have these details sorted, collaborate with your engineering team to detail what specific user or account attributes are tracked in the code. These attributes can then be used to populate Pendo attributes during the pendo.initialize() call, ensuring a seamless data flow.

Product Experience Metadata Design

Product Managers should know their product inside and out. They should understand which paths or funnels are crucial to the success of their users and product goals. They should know which features are most important to optimize engagement. Based on this intimate understanding of the product, PMs can translate what matters most into Pendo-specific metadata (and of course metrics that matter most to track). When it comes to feature engagement, pathing analyses, or funnel optimizations, Pendo's metadata capture capabilities with Location API, Event Properties, and Custom Properties via Track Events should be evaluated.

LocationAPI as a Metadata Tool
LocationAPI is a way for engineers to provide additional context or metadata as part of the URL that Pendo captures when users visit various pages of the product experience. This method enables sophisticated page tagging, segmentation, and filtering capabilities that can be leveraged for pathing analyses, funnel optimizations, or other user session navigation throughout the pages of the experience. 

There are best practices we learned over two years in working with LocationAPI that can help optimize the usability of the data that is captured. For example, sending metadata as query parameter extensions rather than additional pathing elements of the URL makes page tagging and filtering much easier. (There's a lot here, more than we can cover in a blog post... Reach out for more details about LocationAPI best practices if you're in the midst of implementing it!) 

Click Event Properties and Custom Properties
Pendo's out of box Feature Tagging capabilities are great, most of the time, for simple aggregated click engagement tracking. But occasionally, feature tagging doesn't offer enough depth of context. Product Managers need to identify those cases and consider one of two approaches:

1. Use Click Event Properties
2. Use Track Events and Custom Properties

Click Event Properties is a subscription-wide setting in Pendo that gives admins the ability to specify certain property values (ie: metadata) at the time a specific feature is engaged with. These specific Feature Tags, when they are triggered & tracked by Pendo, will then contain additional metadata context about the state things were in when the user engaged with that feature. This is a quick/easy way to capture additional context that extends Feature Tags. 

Pendo also offers a custom event capability called Track Events. These are custom events triggered programmatically. In some cases, more robust & detailed tracking is needed for proper analysis by Product Managers. In such cases, PMs should work with engineering to define and implement Track Events. The added benefit of Track Events is that they extend Pendo's metadata capture capabilities by allowing teams to pass custom properties as part of the event call in code. This allows teams to define their own metadata and programmatically pass it with these events. For example, tracking granular Search dropdown and results capabilities using Pendo's feature tagging can be limited. However, with custom Track Events that trigger around a user's engagement with the Search UI, you can gain deeper insights into user behavior, such as search terms and clicked results. The custom properties passed into these Track Events are powerful metadata that can be used for deeper analysis into the Search UX via Pendo reporting. 

Conclusion

Product Managers are essential in translating their knowledge about product strategy, users, and the product experience into meaningful metadata that can be captured in Pendo. Their involvement from the outset ensures that the metadata design is strategically aligned and implemented before it's too late. The worst-case scenario is when user segmentation or filtering isn't possible due to the lack of proper metadata capture, leading to delays that could span weeks. 

By thinking critically about the metadata needed for their products and leveraging Pendo's robust tracking capabilities, PMs can significantly enhance the effectiveness of their product analytics tracking and reporting tool. 

Are you ready to elevate your Pendo integration? Start thinking about your metadata strategy today. Your future self will thank you.