There might be parts of your application that don't require a login. This article details how Pendo can deliver value for usage analytics and guides with anonymous users (visitors).
Note: Anonymous visitors aren't currently supported in retention reports, the Time to First Use dashboard widget, or Pendo Feedback. This means that you can only view data for identified visitors when using these functionalities.
Visit the Pendo Academy for a video on anonymous visitors in Pendo.
Understand anonymous Visitor IDs
Pendo relies on your application to provide a Visitor ID value. When a Visitor ID isn't provided in the Pendo install script ("snippet")—for example, when an empty string is the set value—Pendo provides an anonymous Visitor ID in the following format: _PENDO_T_ID', such as _PENDO_T_mvugjpoysuT.
If the default value VISITOR-UNIQUE-ID is sent, Pendo also considers this as no visitor ID being provided and generates an anonymous ID.
Pendo saves and tracks anonymous visitors at the browser level using local storage and cookies. If the same user comes back to your application, Pendo attempts to use the same anonymous Visitor ID for them.
A single visitor can be associated with multiple anonymous IDs because a new ID is generated if Pendo can't access the saved anonymous ID or when a cookie isn't present.
To maximize Pendo's ability to track anonymous visitors, we recommend that you don't disable agent cookies or agent user identification persistence in application-level settings or in the Pendo install script ("snippet").
Enable anonymous visitor data
Only Pendo admins can enable anonymous visitor data in Pendo. Navigate to Settings > Subscription Settings, then select Anonymous visitor tracking. This allows you to collect data from visitors that have no assigned Visitor ID and counts toward your total monthly active users (MAU).
For some customers, this setting is labeled as Show anonymous visitor data instead and doesn't include identity management. For more information, see Connect anonymous and identified Visitor IDs later in this article.
Since this setting is applied at the subscription level, it applies to all applications in your subscription.
After you enable anonymous visitor data, you can filter by anonymous visitors with two default segments across Pendo:
- Everyone shows both identified and anonymous users.
- Everyone (Anonymous Visitors Only) shows only anonymous users.
You can also create custom segments to include anonymous visitors.
If you don't want anonymous data, send the Visitor ID metadata through the install script ("snippet"). The install script should be available on all URLs that you intend to have Pendo installed on. For more information about the install script, see the Developer's guide to implementing Pendo using the install script.
Show guides to anonymous visitors
After you enable anonymous visitor data, you can choose to show guides to anonymous visitors by enabling the application-level setting:
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Navigate to Settings > Subscription Settings from the bottom of the left-side menu.
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Open the Applications tab.
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Find and open the relevant app from your Applications list. This opens the App Details tab by default.
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Select Show guides to anonymous visitors.
- Select < Back to Applications, then repeat steps 3 and 4 for each app where you'd like to show guides to anonymous visitors.
After this setting is enabled, you can see anonymous visitors as part of your segment selection. Enabling this setting doesn't impact your monthly active users (MAU) total. However, most Pendo users choose also to enable the Show anonymous visitor data setting so that they can track the effectiveness of their guides for anonymous visitors.
Open and re-save the segment for each guide you want to show to anonymous visitors.
Use the same anonymous ID across subdomains
You can use the same anonymous ID across subdomains by adding cookieDomain"
'.example.com' to the Pendo install script ("snippet").
This only works for subdomains. The same anonymous ID won't be reused across multiple domains. If your app has multiple domains, the same person visiting both sites is represented by different anonymous Visitor IDs.
To learn more, see Track anonymous visitors across subdomains.
Connect anonymous and identified Visitor IDs
If you'd like to connect anonymous Visitor IDs to identified Visitor IDs, you can do so using identity management by enabling the Anonymous visitor tracking subscription setting. If you don't have this option and instead see Show anonymous visitor data, contact your Pendo account representative to get access.
If you have identity management enabled and a person first visits your site as an anonymous user, then signs in within the lifespan of their anonymous browser data (which defaults to 100 days of inactivity and otherwise persists as long as the cookie or local storage isn't cleared), their anonymous activities from the 30 days prior to signing in are merged with their identified visitor record.
For more information on how identity management works, see Identity management overview.