Pendo's Reporting Capabilities for Product Managers

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!

Product Analytics data is only as good as the reporting that presents the meaning behind it to the right audiences. 

Introduction

Product Analytics data is only as good as the reporting that presents the meaning behind it to the right audiences. Product Managers need to carefully design their reporting to get the most out of the data, in order to make the right data-informed decisions for their products. 

This is the eighth post in our series on Product Analytics Integration Best Practices using Pendo. Today, we'll explore Pendo's reporting capabilities, sharing what we've learned from a two-year engagement with a large client. Pendo provides a pretty good "toolbox" of capabilities that allow PM's to dive into reporting quickly. We'll focus on the strengths and limitations of Pendo's dashboard widgets, Data Explorer reports, and more in this post. 

Pendo Dashboards and Widgets

Pendo's dashboards and widgets are the starting point for any Product Manager looking to visualize data quickly. Every user has a default dashboard automatically created that is tied to their account, and Pendo has built up a sizable library of analytics visualization widgets. Once your data is flowing into Pendo, you can begin exploring these various widgets to visualize your data. The interface to add widgets is fairly straightforward and many of the core analytics visualizations that product teams care about are there. 

However, some widgets have limitations, especially when it comes to segmentation and time grain capabilities. For example, while you can segment data to some extent, the time-granularity might not always meet your needs (daily, weekly, monthly, etc). This is something to be mindful of as you set up your dashboards; not all of the widgets you would like to add/visualize might match exactly what you're hoping to be able to report on, in the exact way you'd like. Sometimes this is ok, but sometimes alternative approaches must be explored (see later sections of this post). 

Another potential issue to be aware of relates to Dashboard-level filtering. Pendo dashboards allow users to set filters or segments at the top of the dashboard. One would expect that all widgets that make up that dashboard would then be segmented to this selection, but not all widgets can be segmented in this way. When building dashboards where users might leverage this global filtering/segmentation capability, make sure to explicitly call out any widgets that do not adhere to this in your dashboard. 

Despite these limitations, we found several widgets that were very valuable during our client engagement, especially in the beginning phases of introducing product analytics to various teams who had not previously been exposed to these types of data:

• Weekly Visitor/Accounts: A nice snapshot of weekly visitors and/or accounts.
• Unique Visitors/Hour Heatmap: Highlights peak usage times, essential for understanding user behavior throughout the day.
• Stickiness: Measures how often users return, a key metric for assessing product value.
  
• Feature Adoption: Tracks how your product's core features are being used, helping you gauge their success.

One of the great things about Pendo is their continual investments to improve their reporting capabilities.

One of the great things about Pendo is their continual investments to improve their reporting capabilities. A couple of pretty exciting recent enhancements that we would call out: 

1. Pendo recently added their funnel reporting capability as a dashboard widget. Previously, the funnel report was a separate standing report, which made it harder to share out to business stakeholders. This was a great addition to the dashboard / widget capabilities on Pendo's part, because funnel based reporting is typically a core aspect of a Product Manager's analysis of their product's performance.
2. Pendo is readying the full general release of Dashboard Templates, which gives Product Managers a head start in building dashboards that are fairly standard or typical for product analytics reporting. They are starting with a Product Overview template and a New Feature Launch template. This is pretty exciting, as we look back on our engagement, much of our focused activities were to build out representative dashboards for the various product teams for which we were rolling out Pendo!

Pendo's Data Explorer Report

If you're looking for flexibility and versatility in reporting, Pendo's Data Explorer is where you'll spend most of your time. This report type gives Pendo users the most flexibility in identifying what data to group and visualize, and it gives a pretty robust filtering/segmentation capability tied to the metadata and event properties being captured. Once we had established solid out-of-box reporting using Pendo's basic Dashboard and Widget capabilities with our client's various teams, any new, more sophisticated reporting we desired typically ended up being a Data Explorer report. 

One valuable ability within Data Explorer reporting is the ability to define/select event groupings and compare them against other groupings. We found ourselves using Data Explorer quite often to define specific segments of users and creating comparison groups around core feature engagement activities that we could analyze. For example, how might relatively new users use the platform navigation differently compared to long-term, power users? Or, how might users in a certain region use a set of core content-engagement features differently than users in a different region? Data Explorer gave us the ability to easily run comparisons of core metrics against different segments of users.

While Data Explorer was overall a robust, valuable tool that we used quite a bit, there are limitations that we encountered that should be mentioned here. While it's great to be able to easily set up comparison groups, Data Explorer only allows you to compare two event groups. So, in the case where you need to compare more than two groups, you'll need to set up multiple Data Explorer reports, or find an alternative means to analyze these various groupings of data. 

An additional limitation of the Data Explorer report capability ties to metadata filtering. There is a limit to using this filtering capability to data sets that have less than 10,000 events. This can be challenging for events that occur frequently, especially across a large, heavily-used platform. When you hit this limit, it can restrict your ability to get detailed insights to the proper filtered metadata. In our previous engagement, we had to develop workarounds to address this limitation. As the next section covers, sometimes the limitations in Pendo's reporting requires Product teams to build reporting outside of Pendo's UI.

Leveraging Data Exports and Excel for Advanced Reporting

As mentioned in previous sections of this blog post, sometimes Pendo's reporting capabilities will not meet the needs of your Product team, whether it's based on certain limitations or simply that you have much more sophisticated reporting needs. In this case, the great news is that it's relatively easy to extract your product analytics data from Pendo in various ways that allow you to build external reporting that is exactly what you might need. The simplest way to do this that we'll cover today has to do with exporting certain report types from Pendo and pulling those data sets into Excel.

Pendo's Visitor and/or Account reports can be defined in the Pendo UI and then exported to csv. Similarly, Pendo's Data Explorer reports can also be exported to csv. So as a Product Manager building reporting suites out for yourself, your team, and/or your stakeholders and leadership, it's best to build as much of your product analytics reporting out directly in Pendo as is possible, but then export any specific data that can be leveraged for customized Excel-based reporting.

For example, tying back to some of the limitations in Data Explorer report visualization we encountered, there was a need for us to export specific visitor reports and raw event data to perform deeper time-on-site analyses of certain user segments. Leadership had asked us to provide average time-on-site for a certain segment of users, along with a year-over-year comparison. The time-granularity and YoY comparison was not something we could accomplish in Pendo directly. By segmenting this data, exporting it, and examining it at different time grains in Excel, we could uncover trends and insights that weren't immediately visible within Pendo.

Using Excel, you can build custom reports tailored to your specific needs. Whether it's detailed cohort analysis or advanced data visualizations, having the flexibility to manipulate and analyze data as you see fit is invaluable.

This is the first external reporting workflow we would recommend to Product Managers who have this need. Pendo has many ways to export data beyond report types that can be leveraged by Product teams (Enage API, Pendo's Data Sync capability) to build out data pipelines and more automated reporting. Once a need is established for these bespoke types of reporting through manual creation, we then recommend teams investigate if/how they might automate these reports.

Conclusion

Pendo offers excellent options for product managers to visualize their product data using dashboards and widgets. These tools provide a robust starting point for gaining insights quickly and efficiently. However, for more sophisticated or customized visualizations, mastering Pendo's Data Explorer is essential. And when those tools still fall short, exporting data to Excel gives you the freedom to perform advanced analyses tailored to your unique requirements.

In our two-year engagement with a large client, we've seen firsthand how Pendo's reporting capabilities can transform Product Management. By understanding the strengths and limitations of these tools, you can make more informed decisions and drive better outcomes for your products.