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<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="https://pendo.io" href="https://pendo.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><blockquote><h3>Product Analytics data is only as good as the reporting that presents the meaning behind it to the right audiences.&nbsp;</h3></blockquote><h3>Introduction<br></h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><h3>Pendo Dashboards and Widgets</h3><p>Pendo's <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032203651-Dashboards" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032203651-Dashboards" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dashboards</a> and <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032752991-Dashboard-widgets" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032752991-Dashboard-widgets" target="_blank" rel="noopener">widgets</a> 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.&nbsp;</p><p>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).&nbsp;</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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:</p><ul><li><strong>Weekly Visitor/Accounts:</strong> A nice snapshot of weekly visitors and/or accounts.</li><li><strong>Unique Visitors/Hour Heatmap:</strong> Highlights peak usage times, essential for understanding user behavior throughout the day.</li><li><strong>Stickiness:</strong> Measures how often users return, a key metric for assessing product value.<br></li><li><strong>Feature Adoption:</strong> Tracks how your product's core features are being used, helping you gauge their success.</li></ul><blockquote><p>One of the great things about Pendo is their continual investments to improve their reporting capabilities.</p></blockquote><p>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:&nbsp;</p><ol><li>Pendo recently added their <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360031863292-Funnels" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360031863292-Funnels" target="_blank" rel="noopener">funnel reporting capability</a> 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.</li><li>Pendo is readying the full general release of <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032203651-Dashboards#h_01HQXY5F9YV9TWQ83W5VTR7VDE" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032203651-Dashboards#h_01HQXY5F9YV9TWQ83W5VTR7VDE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dashboard Templates</a>, 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!</li></ol><h3>Pendo's Data Explorer Report<br></h3><p>If you're looking for flexibility and versatility in reporting, Pendo's <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360033574351-Data-Explorer" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360033574351-Data-Explorer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Data Explorer</a> 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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><h3><br>Leveraging Data Exports and Excel for Advanced Reporting<br></h3><p>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.</p><p>Pendo's <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032202791-Visitor-reports" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032202791-Visitor-reports" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Visitor</a> and/or <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032202731-Account-reports" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032202731-Account-reports" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Account</a> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 (<a data-mce-href="https://engageapi.pendo.io/" href="https://engageapi.pendo.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Enage API</a>, Pendo's <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/18214274061595-Overview-of-Pendo-Data-Sync" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/18214274061595-Overview-of-Pendo-Data-Sync" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Data Sync</a> 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.</p><h3>Conclusion<br></h3><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>

Pendo's Reporting Capabilities for Product Managers

<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="http://www.pendo.io" href="http://www.pendo.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><blockquote><h3>Integrating a robust product analytics tool like Pendo into a single platform that houses multiple content-driven products presents unique challenges.</h3></blockquote><h3>Introduction</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><h3>Challenges with Content-Focused Product Platforms</h3><p>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).</p><p>Here are three areas to consider:</p><p><strong>1. Event-based product context is key:</strong> 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.</p><p><strong>2. Users' engagement must have proper product context across page transitions and UI interactions:</strong> 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.&nbsp;<br></p><p><strong>3. Custom events and properties can be life-savers:</strong> 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.</p><h3><br>Event-Based Product Context is Key<br></h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>Luckily, Pendo has provided an awesome capability called <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/13125305910299-Historical-metadata" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/13125305910299-Historical-metadata" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"Historical Metadata"</a> 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.</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><h3>Users' Engagement Across Pages and UI Interactions</h3><p>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).&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><p><strong>Common URL structures:</strong> 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.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Common UI components:</strong> 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.</p><h3><br>Consider: Your Product Hierarchy / Taxonomy</h3><p>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) -&gt; product (ie: 9th grade algebra) -&gt; user-type (ie: students vs teachers). </p><p>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 <a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/advanced/location/" href="https://agent.pendo.io/advanced/location/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LocationAPI</a> to augment page URL context, augmented or <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/21346265192603-Custom-HTML-attributes" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/21346265192603-Custom-HTML-attributes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">custom HTML identifiers</a> with product-specific context that Pendo can hook into for Feature Tags, or, as we'll discuss next, <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Track Events</a> with custom properties - all of these Pendo capabilities should be considered and leveraged fully in this complicated platform/product scenario.</p><h3>More Need for Custom Events (and Properties)</h3><p>Product Managers who work within these complex content-focused product platforms should put additional emphasis on <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo's Track Events</a> 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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><blockquote><h3>With the right product or content specific context captured by Pendo as metadata, teams can build granular and insightful reports tailored to various audiences.</h3></blockquote><h3>The Payoff of the Additional Efforts to Capture Product/Content-Specific Context?&nbsp;<br></h3><p>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:</p><p><strong>Platform-Level Reporting</strong><br>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.</p><p><strong>Content-Specific Product Reporting</strong><br>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.</p><p><strong>Aggregate Insights for Leadership</strong><br>Leadership benefits from aggregated reporting across platform and product lines, which can help them manage certain programs that are targeted toward strategic customer segments.&nbsp;</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>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.</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p>

Pendo within Content-Focused Product Platforms

<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="https://www.pendo.io" href="https://www.pendo.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><h3>Introduction</h3><p>Today’s most successful Product Managers excel at addressing challenging strategic questions regarding their product's true performance. They deliver insightful answers confidently by effectively utilizing product analytics reporting that has been intentionally designed. This blog post explores how Product Managers can get to the "real" answers they must be able to answer by maximizing their use of Pendo for strategic purposes, by employing a top-down design approach.</p><blockquote><h3>Today’s most successful Product Managers excel at addressing challenging strategic questions regarding their product's true performance.</h3></blockquote><h3>What Do We Mean by "Real" Answers?</h3><p>Before we jump in, let's clarify what we mean by "real" answers. In the context of product analytics, real answers are quantified views into various aspects of your product that specifically address the most important product questions that need to be answered, whether it's for leadership, for the Product Manager themself, or stakeholders. "Real" answers provide a clear understanding of what users actually do in the product, rather than assumptions based on gut-feel or market expertise. Getting to "real" answers is crucial for making data-driven decisions that align with user behavior and needs.</p><p>So how do you get to the "real" answers with Pendo? Here's a simple top-down framework to try out:</p><p>1. First, start with your product questions<br>2. Next, wireframe your strategic reporting<br>3. Then build your metrics specification<br>4. Next, build your reports<br>5. Finally, answer your product questions&nbsp;<br></p><h3>First, Start with Your Product Questions</h3><p>The first step in getting to real answers is to identify the strategic questions of which you need answers. This involves collaboration between Product Management and leadership to come up with a list of key questions that can be answered using product analytics data.</p><p>For example, you might want to know:</p><p>- What does adoption look like across various segments of users?<br>- What does the conversion look like for our membership sign-up and purchase flow?<br>- How are users engaging with our new features?<br></p><p>These are examples of essential questions that can guide your product development and marketing strategies. Having a clear list of questions ensures that your analytics efforts are focused and purposeful.&nbsp;</p><h3>Next, Wireframe Your Reporting</h3><p>Once you have your questions, the next step is to imagine what an ideal dashboard or set of reports would look like. This involves wireframing your reports to visualize the data story you want to tell.</p><p>Consider the following:</p><p>- Who will be the primary audience or users of your reporting?&nbsp;<br>- What would you start your story with? High-level aggregate counts or rolled-up KPIs?<br>- What kind of visualizations would be most effective? Simple snapshot counts or daily trends?<br></p><p>By wireframing your reports, you can outline the structure and order of the analytics you will feature. This helps you think through the types of visualizations you need to create valuable and insightful reports.</p><h3>Build Your Metrics Specification</h3><p>With your wireframes in hand, it's time to build a specification of the data points or metrics that need to be captured via Pendo in your product.</p><p>For each analytic, consider:</p><p>- What event data do you need? Clicks on specific UI elements? Visits to certain pages?<br>- How will you filter or segment your reports? By customer segments, active vs. disengaged users?<br></p><p>Defining these metrics and metadata ensures that you capture all the necessary data to answer your strategic questions. This step is crucial for setting up robust and comprehensive analytics.</p><h3>Build Your Reports<br></h3><p>Once your metrics data is flowing, you can start building the analytics components of your ideal reports. Use Pendo's dashboard features and out-of-box reporting components, or leverage <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360033574351-Data-Explorer" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360033574351-Data-Explorer" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo's Data Explorer report</a> for more custom views.</p><p>Pendo is continuously enhancing its features, so always stay updated with the latest improvements. Building your reports is where the magic happens, turning raw data into actionable insights.</p><h3>Answer Your Product Questions</h3><p>With your reports in place, you can now answer the strategic questions you set out to explore. This is where communication and transparency come into play. Share your findings with your team and leadership, discuss the insights, and determine the next steps.</p><p>Effective communication of data and insights ensures that everyone is on the same page and can make informed decisions based on real answers.</p><blockquote><h3>By following these steps, you can ensure that your product decisions are always backed by solid, data-driven insights.</h3></blockquote><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>This top-down approach to designing your product analytics reporting keeps you focused on your product strategy. By starting with key questions, wireframing your reports, defining metrics, and building insightful dashboards, you can uncover real answers that drive your product forward. By following these steps, you can ensure that your product decisions are always backed by solid, data-driven insights. This not only helps in better understanding user behavior but also aligns your product strategy with actual user needs and expectations.</p><p>Try this approach and see how it transforms your product analytics approach. If you have any questions or need advice, reach out, and let's have a conversation about how to get the most out of Pendo and product analytics in general.</p><p><br></p>

How Product Managers can get to Real Answers with Product Analytics

<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="pendo.io" href="pendo.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><blockquote><h3>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.</h3></blockquote><h3>Introduction&nbsp;</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><h3>Why Metadata Matters</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><h3>Visitor and Account Metadata Design</h3><p>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.</p><p><strong>Questions to Consider</strong><br>1. What customer segments using my product matter most? How might these segments be represented in code that could be used to feed Pendo?<br>2. How will I want to filter or segment my reporting on my product? How will leadership want to see the reporting?<br>3. Are there already defined user attributes that we track for our product that can be ported into Pendo?</p><p>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.</p><h3>Product Experience Metadata Design</h3><p>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.</p><p><strong>LocationAPI as a Metadata Tool</strong><br><a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/advanced/location/" href="https://agent.pendo.io/advanced/location/">LocationAPI</a> 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.&nbsp;</p><p>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!)&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Click Event Properties and Custom Properties</strong><br>Pendo's out of box <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360031950492-Tagging-and-viewing-Features" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360031950492-Tagging-and-viewing-Features">Feature Tagging</a> 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:</p><p>1. Use Click Event Properties<br>2. Use Track Events and Custom Properties</p><p><br><a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/7710433678619-Event-properties" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/7710433678619-Event-properties">Click Event Properties</a> 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 &amp; 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.&nbsp;</p><p>Pendo also offers a custom event capability called <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032294151-Track-Events">Track Events</a>. These are custom events triggered programmatically. In some cases, more robust &amp; 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.&nbsp;</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>Are you ready to elevate your Pendo integration? Start thinking about your metadata strategy today. Your future self will thank you.</p>

Pendo, Product Managers, and Metadata Design

<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="http://www.pendo.io" href="http://www.pendo.io">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><blockquote><h3>Integrating analytics tools like Pendo within SPAs can present unique challenges that need to be taken into consideration.</h3></blockquote><h3>Intro</h3><p>Many product-focused companies today build single-page web applications (SPAs), because they offer a seamless user experience by dynamically loading content without refreshing the entire page. Integrating analytics tools like Pendo within SPAs can present unique challenges that need to be taken into consideration. This guide aims to help you understand these challenges and provide practical solutions to ensure accurate data capture and reliable insights.</p><h3>Understanding the Basics of Single vs Multi-Page Applications<br></h3><p>When dealing with web applications, it's crucial to distinguish between single-page and multi-page frameworks. In a multi-page web application, each page change results in a full reload within the browser. This reload action typically triggers the `<a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Agent#initialize" href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Agent#initialize">pendo.initialize(options)</a>` call, capturing the current values of any visitor and account attributes, and passing those to Pendo seamlessly.</p><p>Conversely, in a single-page web application, page transitions are handled dynamically, eliminating the need for a full page reload. This dynamic nature poses a potential pitfall for Pendo integration. If any changes occur to visitor or account attribute values due to state changes, Pendo might not capture the most recent values, leading to data integrity issues. This can result in event data being associated with outdated visitor or account attributes, compromising the accuracy of your reports and insights.</p><h3>The Importance of State Changes in Your App<br></h3><p>Understanding state changes within your app is pivotal for effective Pendo integration. Users interact with various elements, transition between pages, and perform actions that might alter their user profile, account, or other aspects tied to visitor and account attributes (metadata). In a single-page application framework, it's essential to identify all possible points where state changes can be triggered.</p><p>For instance, if a user navigates to their profile page and updates their email address, this constitutes a state change affecting a visitor attribute. Recognizing these state change points allows you to coordinate with your engineering team to ensure that Pendo captures these attribute changes accurately.</p><h3>pendo.updateOptions(options)<br></h3><p>Once you've mapped out all potential state change points across your single-page application, the next step is to collaborate with your engineering partners. It's crucial to integrate the `<a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions" href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions">pendo.updateOptions(options)</a>` call at these state change points. By doing so, you ensure that the latest attribute values are passed to Pendo during the user's session, preventing any data integrity issues.</p><p>Your engineering team can help identify the best places to implement `<a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions" href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions">pendo.updateOptions(options)</a>`, ensuring that attribute updates are captured in real-time. This collaboration is key to maintaining accurate and trustworthy data, which is essential for making informed product decisions.</p><blockquote><h3>Our insights come from real-world experience working with a client on their single-page web application.</h3></blockquote><h3>Real-world Lessons Learned<br></h3><p>Our insights come from real-world experience working with a client on their single-page web application. Early on, we faced challenges with Pendo reporting accuracy due to the dynamic nature of this client's SPA framework and changing states from users' sessions. By closely monitoring state changes and implementing `<a data-mce-href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions" href="https://agent.pendo.io/public/Identity#updateOptions">pendo.updateOptions(options)</a>`, we ensured that their data events and attributes were associated correctly.</p><p>This led to accurate and reliable reports, providing valuable insights into user behaviors. The success of this integration highlights the importance of understanding state changes within SPA web apps and ensuring Pendo is always updated properly throughout users' sessions.</p><h3>Conclusion<br></h3><p>Integrating Pendo within a single-page web application framework requires careful consideration of state changes and collaboration with your engineering team. By paying close attention to attribute updates and ensuring accurate data capture, you can achieve reliable insights and make informed product decisions.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

Pendo and Single-Page Applications

<p><em>Are you considering integrating <a data-mce-href="http://www.pendo.io" href="http://www.pendo.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pendo</a> 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!</em></p><h3>Intro</h3><p>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.</p><blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote><h3>CNAME Considerations</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360043539891-CNAME-for-Pendo" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360043539891-CNAME-for-Pendo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CNAME configuration documentation</a>, which is well documented.</p><h3>CSP Considerations</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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 <a data-mce-href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032209131-Content-Security-Policy-CSP" href="https://support.pendo.io/hc/en-us/articles/360032209131-Content-Security-Policy-CSP" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CSP configuration documentation</a> is well documented.&nbsp;</p><h3>HTML Identifiers Considerations</h3><p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>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.</p>

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Pendo, Product Managers, and Metadata Design

Pendo and Single-Page Applications

Pendo: Configuration Gotchas to Consider