This article provides instructions for how you can test, segment, schedule, and publish your guide. For instructions on creating a guide, see one of the following articles:
- Create an overlay guide
- Create an embedded guide
- Create a cross-app guide
- Create a form validation guide
Understand guide statuses
A guide can be set to one of the following statuses:
- Draft. The guide doesn’t appear in any environment and can still be edited.
- Pending Review. Guide creators and guide contributors can indicate that the guide is awaiting review. Guide publishers and guide reviewers can use this status to filter the guides list to see which guides are awaiting review. Setting the guide status to Pending Review doesn’t push the guide to staging.
- Staged. The guide is only visible in your designated staging environments for you to test and validate. Subscription admins can manage staging environments. For more information, see Stage your guide.
- Public. The guide is immediately visible to all visitors targeted by the guide’s segment and appears in its designated location on all environments that has Pendo installed, including any staging environments. The Public status overrides a start date and time specified in any scheduling.
- Scheduled. The guide is set to go live on the specified date and time. If an end date and time is also scheduled, the guide will end on this date and time.
- Inactive. The guide that was published is no longer public. This status is for guides that were once live.
To delete a guide, click the trash icon in the top-right corner of the page, next to the status dropdown. Note that deleted guides and any associated surveys can't be recovered.
Test your guide
If you want to test your guide's functionality, you can either:
- Push your guide to a staging environment. For more information, see Stage your guide.
- Set the segment for your guide to include just you as an eligible visitor and then set the guide's status to Public. When you're done testing your guide, change the status back to Draft and then follow the steps in the next sections before continuing.
Segment your guide
To ensure you deliver your guide to the right groups of visitors:
- From the Settings tab of your guide, select Edit in the top-right corner of the Segment card.
- Choose a segment or hover over Custom Segment and select the edit (pencil) icon in the top-right corner of the dropdown menu.
- Edit the segment following the instructions in Segments as needed for your guide audience.
- If you're segmenting the guide to only you for testing purposes, add a segment rule that identifies only you.
- For example, if your Visitor ID is your email address, the segment rule might include: Visitor ID + is equal to + <your email>.
- Optionally, turn on Controlled Rollout to limit the guide to a random subset of visitors in the segment. For more information, see Use controlled rollout to limit guide exposure later in this article.
- Select Save in the top-right corner of the Segment card.
When you're done editing your segment, continue with scheduling or publishing your guide.
Schedule and publish your guide
After you've created a guide, its status is automatically set to Draft. You have two options for publishing your guide:
- Publish your guide manually by changing its status to Public.
- Schedule your guide to go live at a specified date and time.
Regardless of which of the above options you choose, you can also set a guide expiration date and time. When a guide reaches its expiration date and time, it stops displaying to visitors. The guide's status changes from Public to Inactive shortly after expiration. If you don't set an expiration date and time, you must remove the guide manually.
Before you do either of these, you might want to stage your guide or have someone review it. For more information, see Guide statuses in this article.
Set your guide to Public
To manually publish your guide, choose Public from the dropdown menu in the top-right corner of the page. The guide is then public to all visitors identified in the guide's segment and appears in a dedicated location on all environments with Pendo installed, including any staging environments.
Schedule your guide
You can schedule your guide to do one or both of the following: start (move to Public) at a specific date and time, and expire (move to Inactive) at a specific date and time.
- From the Settings tab of your guide, select Edit in the top-right corner of the Scheduling card.
- If you want your guide to start at a specific date and time, turn on Start Date / Time and then choose a start date and time from the dropdown menus.
- If you want your guide to expire at a specific date and time, turn on Expiration Date / Time and then choose an expiration date and time from the dropdown menus.
- Select Save in the top-right corner of the Scheduling card.
- Select Scheduled from the dropdown menu in the top-right corner of the page.
- If you leave a scheduled guide in a Staged state, it only becomes available in the staging environment. The guide doesn't transition to Public.
- If you leave a scheduled guide in a Public state, the scheduling is ineffective because the guide is already live.
Note: When you add an expiration date and time to a guide, the guide expires at the correct time, but the Pendo UI might not show the guide as Inactive until the top of the hour, when data processing occurs. For example, if a guide is set to expire at 5:30 PM, it expires at that time but might not be reflected in the Pendo UI until 6 PM.
Use controlled rollout to limit guide exposure
Controlled rollout lets you show a guide to only a portion of your segment. This helps you minimize risk and collect feedback before releasing a guide more broadly.
Use this option when you're not sure how a guide will perform or want to validate its content and placement with a small group first. You can adjust the rollout percentage at any time, even after the guide is published.
- In the top-right corner of the Segment card, select Edit.
- Turn on Controlled Rollout below the segment selector.
- Use the slider or input box to set the percentage of visitors in the segment who should see the guide.
- Select Save.
You can return to the Segment card at any time to update the rollout percentage.