Pendo within Content-Focused Product Platforms

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!

Integrating a robust product analytics tool like Pendo into a single platform that houses multiple content-driven products presents unique challenges.

Introduction

Navigating the intricacies of product analytics within complex platforms can be daunting, especially for those matrix-organizations that manage multiple products differentiated by content within a single platform architecture. For example, Edtech companies that manage digital platforms across all K-12 subjects and their respective educational content. Think of how many "products" (aka, educational content like 9th grade math) this entails, each of which is led by Product Managers. Add on top of that the Platform-focused Product Managers who care about how the platform meets the needs across all of these users (teachers and students). This is no easy task to build and maintain, and when it comes to integrating Product Analytics, there is much to think through intentionally and proactively. 

In this 7th installment of our series on Product Analytics Best Practices, we’ll explore how to effectively leverage Pendo within these content-heavy platform environments. Our insights are based on two years of hands-on experience with a large client, ensuring you get the most out of Pendo’s capabilities.

Challenges with Content-Focused Product Platforms

Integrating a robust product analytics tool like Pendo into a single platform that houses multiple content-driven products presents unique challenges. While a common platform architecture simplifies engineering, it complicates product analytics, especially when users switch between different products mid-session (imagine teachers switching between the courses they teach, each of which is a different content-product).

Here are three areas to consider:

1. Event-based product context is key: Accurate event-based context is critical for distinguishing between various content products (ie: 9th grade math versus 6th grade english). Tracking the user’s context in real-time ensures that analyses reflect the correct product engagement.

2. Users' engagement must have proper product context across page transitions and UI interactions: Common URL structures and UI element identifiers in single platform / multi-product architectures requires Product Managers to work with Engineers closely to ensure the right content-product context can be provided per page transition or UI interaction. 

3. Custom events and properties can be life-savers: Sometimes Pendo's out of box capabilities make it much harder to associate the right content-product context with the events the user is generating in their session; this is when the power of Track Events and custom properties can really help.

Event-Based Product Context is Key

Pendo’s visitor and account attributes are "last-in, first-out", meaning the most recent values passed in are persisted until the next session updates. This works for most visitor and account attributes that don't really change that often (think: the user's email address or the company's state location). But, for some attributes, what we really need is an event-based historical record of these attributes, so that we can accurately track users' states during their sessions. This is especially critical in content-product platforms, where users could be switching between courses mid-session. 

Luckily, Pendo has provided an awesome capability called "Historical Metadata" that they rolled out in the last 18 months that tracks attributes at the event level, allowing for more precise context management. Using Historical Metadata to capture event-specific context, such as the content product a user is engaged with, significantly improves data accuracy. This ensures that each event reflects the correct product context.

Product Managers working within these content-product platforms will need to think critically about what key Visitor and Account attributes are going to be critical per-event versus "last-in, first-out", to ensure proper segmentation at the product level can be applied to the events within users' sessions. These attributes should be designated as "Historical Metadata" in Pendo. 

Users' Engagement Across Pages and UI Interactions

A single platform/multi-product architecture offers significant benefits from an architectural build out and maintenance perspective, but makes it much harder to implement product analytics. For example, a single platform might have common pages that can be applied to any of the content-specific products (ie: the 9th grade math homepage might be the same underlying platform page as the 6th grade english homepage). Similarly, the platform might actually use the same UI components across its various content-products (ie: a main navigation is the same no matter what product the user is in). 

What this means for Product Managers as they think through how to best integrate Pendo into their platform boils down to making sure that the proper level of content-product context can be provided, in/around the use of these common architectural structures.

Common URL structures: If the platform uses similar URL structures across its content-products, the PM should think about how to best associate the product's context with the page transitions of users during their sessions. 

Common UI components: If the platform leverages shared UI components, PM's should think about how they might identify or distinguish the content-product the user is within when they interact with these elements.

Consider: Your Product Hierarchy / Taxonomy

Product Managers should consider how Pendo's great metadata features might help them differentiate content-product events from each other during users' sessions. The first thing the PMs should align on with their teams and broader PM organization is how the "content-products" should be hierarchically organized, or what the product "taxonomy" should look like. In the Edtech space, for example, an oversimplified product hierarchy could look like: subject area (ie: math) -> product (ie: 9th grade algebra) -> user-type (ie: students vs teachers).

If alignment can be reached about this product hierarchy, then the right Pendo metadata capabilities can be leveraged to provide that context at the event level. Consider Pendo's LocationAPI to augment page URL context, augmented or custom HTML identifiers with product-specific context that Pendo can hook into for Feature Tags, or, as we'll discuss next, Track Events with custom properties - all of these Pendo capabilities should be considered and leveraged fully in this complicated platform/product scenario.

More Need for Custom Events (and Properties)

Product Managers who work within these complex content-focused product platforms should put additional emphasis on Pendo's Track Events and custom properties as a powerful way to capture their product hierarchy or taxonomy metadata at crucial parts of their product UX. These custom events and properties are often more effective than using Pendo’s out-of-the-box tagging features. 

The downside, of course, is that the Product Manager will need to partner with their Engineering team to implement these Track Events. So PM's should be very strategic and selective in the Track Events they prioritize to be built out, to correspond with the most critical events of their products.

With the right product or content specific context captured by Pendo as metadata, teams can build granular and insightful reports tailored to various audiences.

The Payoff of the Additional Efforts to Capture Product/Content-Specific Context? 

With the right product or content specific context captured by Pendo as metadata, teams can build granular and insightful reports tailored to various audiences. The types of reporting that can be built out include:

Platform-Level Reporting
Platform Product Managers can create aggregate reports to analyze UX flows and optimize overall platform performance. This high-level view can assist in the overall performance of the platform across all customers / users who engage within the platform UX across the various content-specific products.

Content-Specific Product Reporting
Content Product Managers can segment reports to focus on their specific product hierarchies/taxonomies. These PM's can analyze how their specific users interact with the content products of which they manage, providing them the ability to make data-informed decisions specific to their content products.

Aggregate Insights for Leadership
Leadership benefits from aggregated reporting across platform and product lines, which can help them manage certain programs that are targeted toward strategic customer segments. 

Conclusion

For Product Managers operating within complex single-platform, multi-product environments, intentionally designed Pendo integration is crucial to ensure the right levels of granularity across the platform and product hierarchy are captured and able to be segmented for reporting. Understanding and implementing the right context around content hierarchy or taxonomy is vital for generating meaningful insights.

By leveraging Pendo’s metadata capabilities, including visitor and account attributes as Historical Metadata, Track Events with custom properties, or even LocationAPI and/or even custom HTML identifiers, Product Managers can ensure accurate, context-rich analytics for all audiences. 

Take the next step in mastering Pendo within content-focused platforms. Implement these strategies and elevate your product analytics to drive success across your organization.