A-B
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Account | – | A Pendo-specific hierarchy of data that represents a group of visitors. For more information, see Accounts. |
| Account report | – | A type of report that provides insights into how visitors from a specific account interact with your application. You can view the account information that's most important to you by customizing the time range, segments, and table data. You can also save your custom reports and export them to CSV. |
| Acquisition | – |
The total number of new visitors or accounts that interact with a tagged Page, Feature, or Track Event for the first time. Acquisition helps you measure initial exposure to a part of your application. Unlike retention, acquisition only reflects first-time interactions. |
| Adoption | – |
A metric that shows how often visitors or accounts use tagged Pages, Features, or Track Events. Adoption helps you understand whether key parts of your application are being used, and how usage changes over time. Adoption appears in Product Engagement Score (PES), as well as in widgets and reports throughout Pendo. |
| Agent | – |
The pendo.js file that provides event collection, in-app guidance, and a Feedback module, depending on your Pendo subscription. For more information on these components, see Components of the install script. |
| Application | App | A distinct web or mobile application hosted on a single platform (for example, web, iOS, or Android). Applications can be grouped under a single subscription. For more information, see Multi-app subscriptions. |
| Badge | – | An icon that you place next to an element in your application during guide creation. Badges are primarily used for opening supplemental explanations for functionality that would otherwise clutter the UI if permanently displayed. For more information, see Guide activation options: Visual Design Studio. |
C-D
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Canonical Name | CNAME | The domain name that maps your subdomain to a location. For more information, see CNAME for Pendo. |
| Click event | – | When a visitor clicks on an element in your application. Click events are used to track how visitors navigate through your application. |
| Clip | – | A trimmed segment of a replay that you've saved to highlight a specific moment or behavior. Clips can be shared with others in your organization and added to playlists. For more information, see Create replay clips. |
| Content delivery network | CDN | A system of distributed servers (network) that reduces latency in the delivery of web content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. Cached versions of web content are stored in multiple geographical locations (points of presence, PoP), which deliver content to visitors based on proximity. |
| Content Security Policy | CSP | An added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attack, including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. For more information, see Content Security Policy (CSP). |
| Cascading Style Sheets | CSS | The markup language used to apply styling to HTML elements. CSS syntax is used for Feature tagging and guide positioning in Pendo. For a list of supported selectors, see Using CSS selectors in Feature tagging. |
| Core Event | – | A specific action taken in your application that you've defined as a key indicator of value. You can designate up to 10 tagged Features, Pages, and Track Events as Core Events for each app in your subscription. Core Events are used to track PES and listed separately from other events when building segments and reports. |
| CSS selector | – | The part of a CSS rule set that selects the content you want to style. Pendo makes use of CSS selectors for element matching. |
| Custom metadata | – | Data fields that you define and pass to Pendo to describe your visitors or accounts, such as role, subscription plan, or lifecycle stage. Used in segments and reports. |
| Daily active users | DAU | The number of active, unique visitors in a day. See also WAU and MAU. |
| Dashboard | – | A customizable, centralized view of key metrics and trends, created using widgets that offer overviews, visualizations, and snapshot insights of user engagement, feature interaction, and overall product health. For more information, see Dashboards. |
| Data Explorer | – | A custom reporting tool that's used to gain deeper insights into visitor or account behavior by querying event, guide, or app data to visualize trends and comparisons. Break usage down by metadata, compare segments or date ranges, filter by event properties, or add formulas. For more information, see Data Explorer. |
| Data Mappings | – | A page in the Pendo UI where you can see the name and type of data that Pendo uses for analyses. For more information, see Data mapping and data types in Pendo and Configure visitor and account metadata. |
| Data Sync | – | A paid Pendo offering that allows you to push data out of Pendo into your data lake or warehouse and business intelligence (BI) tools so that you can perform complex queries and analyses. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Data Sync. |
| Dead click | – | A click event that doesn't result in any visible changes in your application. This includes no DOM changes, document events (like scrolling), or browser actions within a short time. This is a frustration indicator. |
| Designer | – | An unofficial term used to describe the Visual Design Studio, which is the in-app designer that allows you to create and edit guides within your application and to tag Features and Pages. |
| Designer (classic) | – | The name of the classic in-app designer that's been replaced by the Visual Design Studio. |
| Document Object Model | DOM | A programming language for web documents (webpages) that allows programs to interact with the structure, style, and content of the webpage dynamically. Each object in the DOM corresponds to a part of the webpage, such as elements, attributes, and text. For more information, see Introduction to the DOM. |
| DOM tree | – | A hierarchical data representation of a webpage's structure, style, and content according to the DOM. The root of the DOM tree represents the webpage itself, and each node underneath it represents the structure of the webpage's elements. Each node in the DOM tree represents a part of the webpage, such as an element, attribute, or text object. |
E-F
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Element matching | – | A method for allowing you to target elements in your application through CSS selectors so that you can tag Features, and choose locations for tooltip guides and badge locations. |
| Embedded guide | – | An in-app message, designed in Pendo, that's part of your Page and is always positioned inside the selected element on the Page. For more information, see Create an embedded guide. |
| Error click | – | A click event that generates a client-side JavaScript error within 100 milliseconds. If an error message is defined, it appears in the event log of a replay. This is a frustration indicator. |
| Event | – | A specific action that a visitor takes in your application that Pendo can track and analyze. Pendo collects these actions as raw events to track visitor behavior within your application. Events can be: click events, focus events, load events, Track Events, or guide events. For more information, see Events overview. |
| Event goals | – | A feature that allows you to create and track an ongoing or time-bound usage goal for a specific Page, Feature, or Track Event. You can define your goal based on the number of clicks or views, accounts, or visitors. For more information, see Event goals. |
| Event log | – | A timeline of events that occurred during a session, visible in the replay player. This includes Feature clicks, Page views, frustration indicators, and Track Events. Use the event log to navigate to key points in the replay or investigate specific behaviors. |
| Event properties | – | Details associated with an event. Event properties are used in reports and segments to target or analyze how your visitors are using your application over time. There are two types of event properties: global and custom. For more information, see Event properties. |
| Exclude list | – | A subscription-wide setting available to Admins that filters out events from the metrics and calculations for segments. For more information, see Exclude and include lists. |
| Extract, transform, and load | ETL | A standard data integration process that combines, cleans, and organizes data from multiple sources into a single, consistent data set for storage in a data lake, data warehouse, or other unified data repository. |
| Features | – | The tagged UI elements in your application, such as buttons and links, used throughout Pendo in segments, funnels, and so on. For more information, see View and manage tagged Features. |
| Feature tagging | – | The process of selecting the UI elements in your application that Pendo identifies as Features in its analytics. Feature tagging is retroactive, so you can tag relevant Features when you need them and still have all of the data. For more information, see Feature tagging. |
| Feedback (classic) | – | Part of the classic suite of Pendo tools designed to centralize and prioritize user feedback. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Feedback. This is different from the feedback collection tool in Listen. |
| Feedback (Listen) | – | A page in the Listen platform where you can manage customer feedback in saved table views. Each feedback view includes AI-powered insights and high-level trends. Though it has similar features, the Feedback page in Listen is different to the classic Pendo Feedback product. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Listen. |
| First visit | – | The date and time that Pendo first receives an event from an account or visitor. |
| Focus event | – | When a visitor interacts with an element without clicking on it, such as tabbing through elements in your application. Focus events contribute to time on app calculations. The only way to view focus events is by filtering for them in a visitor's activity log. |
| Frustration | – |
A composite signal that indicates potential user friction in your application. Frustration includes rage clicks, error clicks, U-turns, dead clicks, NPS detractors, and over-guidance. These indicators are surfaced across Session Replay, Data Explorer, and individual visitor activity logs. |
| Funnel | – | A behavior report in Pendo that allows you to measure how visitors move through a defined series of steps in your application. Funnels can provide high-level clarity on where your visitors “drop off” when following these steps. For more information, see Funnels. |
G-H
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| General Data Protection Regulations | GDPR | A regulation that governs data protection and privacy rules in the EU and the European Economic Area as of May 25, 2018. |
| Goal | – |
Create and track an ongoing or time-bound usage goal for a specific Page, Feature, or Track Event. Define your goal based on the number of clicks or views, accounts, or visitors. For more information, see Event goals. See also Guide goal. |
| Growth | – | A metric that reflects the net increase in active visitors or accounts over time. Used in Product Engagement Score (PES). |
| Guide | – | An in-app message, designed in Pendo, that can be used to alert users of new features, walk users through tasks, poll users, onboard users, and so on. We offer multiple types of guides, including tooltip, lightbox, banner, and walkthrough (multi-step guide). Guides can be tied to a Page or element inside of a Page. For more information, see Create a guide. |
| Guides | – | A Pendo product that allows you to build, publish, and analyze guides. For more information, see Create a guide. |
| Guide event | – | A user interaction with a guide, such as a button click or form submission. Guide events capture specific guide-related behavior, which you configure in the guide step settings. |
| Guide goal | – |
Guide goals measure guide effectiveness by tracking adoption of a specific Feature, Page, or Track Event after viewing a specific guide. For more information, see Set guide goals. |
| Historical metadata | – | A feature that allows you to capture the past values of up to 25 metadata fields, instead of just the current value associated with a visitor or account. This feature gives you the ability to track changes in metadata values over time. For more information, see Historical metadata. |
I-J
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Identity mapping | – | A feature that links the activities performed by a visitor before they sign in to your application with the activities they performed as an identified visitor. For more information, see Identity mapping overview. |
| Identity Provider | IdP |
A service that manages end-user accounts analogous to user directories such as LDAP and Active Directory, and can send SAML responses to service providers to authenticate end users. Examples: Google, Azure, Okta. |
| Include list | – | A subscription-wide setting available to Admins that only collects data from server domains that you specify. For more information, see Exclude and include lists. |
| Install script | – | A short JavaScript function that retrieves and loads the Pendo agent code (pendo.js). This is one way to install and configure Pendo. For more information, see Implementation options and Components of the install script. |
| Journey (in Analytics > Workflows) | – | Journeys focus exclusively on analyzing the sequential steps visitors take to complete a workflow. These journeys highlight common routes, completion times, and inefficiencies. For more information, see Workflow journeys. |
| Journey (in Orchestrate) | – | A feature in Orchestrate that delivers messages (emails and guides) to visitors when those visitors join a defined segment. For more information, see Overview of Orchestrate. |
K-L
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Key-value | – | A set of two linked data items, where the key is a unique identifier that points to the corresponding value. You can add custom key values in the Pendo install script to pass additional metadata from your visitors and accounts. |
| Last visit | – | The most recent date and time that Pendo received an event from an account or visitor. |
| Layout | – | A format that can be applied to guides deployed in your application. Layouts hide the underlying HTML and CSS, allowing non-technical users to create and edit guides in a form-field interface. For more information, see Guide layouts. |
| Listen | – | Pendo's continuous discovery, validation, and planning platform consisting of the ability to collect feedback, create and validate ideas, and build roadmaps. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Listen. |
| Load event | – | When a visitor loads a URL in your application. Also referred to as Page view events, load events are used to track visits to tagged Pages in your application. |
M-O
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | MAU | The number of unique, active visitors in a month. See also DAU and WAU. For more information, see Monthly active users (MAU). |
| Metadata | – | A set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Pendo stores metadata at the account and visitor levels. For more information, see Configure visitor and account metadata. |
| Most recent browser | – | Data that the user agent collects from the browser, which includes browser name, browser version, and operating system. |
| Most recent server | – | The server name parsed from the URL associated with the last event sent by a visitor. |
| Net Promoter Score | NPS | A common metric for customer loyalty and overall user satisfaction. NPS can be measured over time and used to compare products. For more information, see Understand NPS metrics. |
| NPS detractor | – | A visitor who submits an NPS response with a rating of 0 to 6. This is a frustration indicator. |
| Number of days active | – | The sum of every day within a date range that contains at least one event from a visitor or account. |
| Number of events | – | The sum of all events (clicks, loads, and so on) coming into Pendo. Time on app serves as a better indication of activity. |
| Orchestrate | – | A product designed to help product teams deliver timely messages to the right users to drive product usage and adoption. For more information, see Overview of Orchestrate. |
| Organization | – | The configuration level above the subscription level, used to group Pendo subscriptions. Organization settings control shared functionality across subscriptions. For more information, see Organization settings overview. |
| Over-guidance | – | Generated when a visitor is shown too many guides in a short time. This includes: 3 guides in 5 minutes, 5 in 6 minutes, or 10 in 61 minutes. This is a frustration indicator. |
P-R
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Page | – | The URLs that you've tagged in Pendo to track page views. A Page in Pendo can capture multiple URLs. For more information, see View and manage tagged Pages. |
| Page tagging | – | The process of identifying URLs in your application that Pendo identifies as Pages in its analytics. Page tagging is retroactive, so you can tag relevant Pages when you need them and still have all the data. For more information, see Page tagging. |
| Path | – | A behavior report in Pendo that shows a visual representation of the sequence of actions that visitors took before or after interacting with a specific Page, Feature, or Track Event. Paths can help you understand how users naturally navigate your app. For more information, see Paths. |
| Pendo Academy | – | A website where Pendo customers can learn Pendo products and best practices for being product-led. It offers on-demand courses, live classes, and certification opportunities. For more information, see academy.pendo.io. |
| Pendo Launcher | – |
A browser extension that you deploy to deliver Pendo on end-users' browsers using a managed settings policy. This is one way to install and configure Pendo. For more information, see Implementation options. |
| Playlist | – |
A collection of saved clips grouped together to highlight related behaviors, issues, or use cases in Session Replay. Playlists can be used to share insights across teams and track patterns over time. For more information, see Create replay playlists. |
| Poll | – | A survey of visitor opinion that you can add to guides to gather feedback from your users. Available poll types include: Multiple Choice, Open Text Field, Yes/No, Number Scale, and NPS (Net Promoter Score). For more information, see Add guide content using building blocks. |
| Processing | – | A status given to a newly created or edited Feature or Page while Pendo retroactively finds and reclassifies historical events based on that Feature or Page. The amount of time a Feature or Page is in "Processing" depends on the amount of data you have in Pendo. |
| Product Areas | – | Specific, tangible locations that represent core areas of your application or groups of products, used to filter your analytics and feedback by parts of your application. For more information, see Product Areas. |
| Product Engagement Score | PES | Pendo-specific metric for understanding product health. It combines three metrics tied to user engagement: adoption, stickiness, and growth. For more information, Product Engagement Score (PES). |
| Rage click | – | A set of repeated clicks in a small area of your application, typically indicating that a visitor is frustrated or something isn't working as expected. This is a frustration indicator. |
| Replay | – | An individual recording of a visitor's session that shows how they interacted with your application. When lowercase, "replay" refers to an individual session. When capitalized, "Replay" might refer to the Session Replay product. For more information, see Overview of Session Replay. |
| Replay library | – | A page in Session Replay where you can search, filter, and view recent replays. The library shows high-level details for each replay, including visitor metadata, device type, session duration, and indicators of frustration. You can select a row to open the replay player and watch the session. |
| Replay player | – | The page where you can view and interact with a specific replay. The replay player includes playback controls, a timeline of events, and tools for filtering, viewing metadata, and navigating between tabs. For more information, see Watch replays. |
| Resource Center | – | A customizable menu that a user can open from a badge in your app. The Resource Center provides on-demand access to contextual help, such as published guides, support articles, and announcements. For more information, see Overview of the Resource Center. |
| Retention | – | Tracking user return rates over time. The retention report analyzes cohorts based on visitors' first interactions, while the Retention by First Use dashboard widget focuses on early event usage's impact on retention compared to average rates. For more information, see Retention and Retention by First Use widget. |
| Roadmap (classic Pendo Feedback) | – | A communication tool that helps you visualize and share your product vision with internal teams. This has been superseded by Roadmaps in Listen. |
| Roadmaps (Listen) | – | A page in the Listen platform where you can map features and initiatives to plan and share your product delivery work. This is a more complete feature that builds on classic Feedback Roadmap but is specific to Listen. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Listen and Roadmaps in Listen. |
S-T
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Sample group | – | An integer value between 0 and 99 that's automatically assigned to each unique visitor at random. The field can be used in segments to sample populations of your visitors from their first visit to your application. |
| Security Assertion Markup Language | SAML | An XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an Identity Provider (IdP) and Service Provider (SP). The SAML standard addresses issues that are unique to the SSO solution. |
| Segment | – | A group of accounts or visitors that's filtered based on product usage and metadata. Segments can also be used to target guides at specific populations of your users. For more information, see Segments. |
| Service Provider | SP | Generally, a company, such as Pendo, providing organizations with communications, storage, processing, or other services. |
| Session playback | – | The ability to capture and watch user interactions with your application, called replays. For more information, see Watch replays. |
| Session Replay | – | Pendo's session replay product that allows you to watch playbacks of user interactions with your web apps, providing insights into user behavior through both a visual and data lens. For more information, see Session Replay overview. |
| Single Sign-On | SSO | A system in which the user signs in to the Identity Provider (IdP) once, and can then access multiple systems without being prompted to sign in for each one. Users can access all of their web applications, both behind the firewall and in the cloud, with a single sign-in. This centralizes access control to a SAML admin. |
| Snippet | – | A programming term for a small region of reusable source code, machine code, or text. Pendo first-party (direct web) installation requires the insertion of a short JavaScript snippet called the install script into a template that's present on every page in your application. This snippet securely and asynchronously loads a JavaScript file, called the install script, from our CDN. |
| Software development kit | SDK | The Pendo SDK for mobile applications, which provides developers with tools to instrument their apps and collect data on user interactions, feature usage, and other relevant metrics. This data can then be analyzed within the Pendo platform to gain insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions to improve the mobile app's user experience. For more information, see Mobile SDK data collection. |
| Staging | – | A guide status before you publish it. Guides in staging display only on specific web application server hostnames or domains (for example, preview.example.com, *.qa.example.com, or demo.example.com). |
| Stickiness | – | A metric that measures how often users return to your product. Calculated as the ratio of DAU to WAU or MAU, depending on the date range. Used in Product Engagement Score (PES). |
| Subscription | – | Your Pendo account with access to one or more applications under a single plan or agreement. Every subscription has a default web application. |
| System for Cross-Domain Identity Management | SCIM | An open standard for securely managing user identity information across multiple domains with application-level provisioning protocols. SCIM provides a defined schema for representing users and groups, and a way of running operations on those user and group resources. |
| Tagging | – | The process of defining the elements or URLs that you want Pendo to track for analytics. You "tag" Features and Pages with Pendo, and Pendo reports analytics based on those tags. For more information, see Tagging with the Visual Design Studio. |
| Template layouts | – |
In Guides, a format that can be applied to guides that are deployed in your application. Template layouts hide the underlying HTML and CSS, allowing non-technical users to create and edit guides in a form-field interface. For more information, see Use guide layouts. |
| Theme | – | A group of similar NPS textual responses used to organize and analyze the responses to an NPS survey. Themes can be added manually or using machine learning models. For more information, see Manage NPS themes and insights. |
| Throttling | – | Setting a limit on the number of guides and a time delay between automatic guides. For more information, see Order and throttle your guides. |
| Time on app | – | For visitor data, the time (in minutes) each visitor spent in your app. We add one minute to the counter for each minute of any activity (see Event), including page load, focus, clicks, and so on. If a user isn't interacting with the site, we don't count that time. The corresponding visitor time (in minutes) is added together for account data. For more information, see Time on page and app calculations. |
| Time on guide | – | The time (in minutes) that each visitor spent in your guide, organized around each step. |
| Toolkit | – | A package of add-ons that includes tool to enhance Pendo's functionality on applications such as Salesforce. |
| Track Event | – | An event type that programmatically captures custom point-in-time events, such as errors or API calls. For more information, see Track Events. |
U-Z
| Term | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| U-turn | – | When a visitor navigates to a tagged Page and returns to the previous Page within seven seconds. Navigation to any other Page during that time disqualifies it as a U-turn. This is a frustration indicator. |
| Validate | – | A page in the Listen platform where you can create ideas and then compare, test, and prioritize them. You can also link ideas to specific customer feedback, provide workarounds for ideas, create segments out of ideas, and promote ideas to items on your roadmaps. For more information, see Overview of Pendo Listen. |
| Visitor | – | A unique end user visiting your application. This visitor can belong to one or more accounts. For more information, see Visitors. |
| Visitor activity log | – | A chronological log of all events associated with a specific visitor. Open the activity log by selecting View Activity on a visitor’s details page. Events are grouped by date and can be filtered by tagged Features, tagged Pages, guides, Track Events, untagged Pages, focus events, and frustration. Use the activity log to investigate detailed user behavior. |
| Visitor report | – | A type of report that provides insights into how your end users interact with your application. You can view the visitor information that's most important to you by customizing the time range, segments, and table data. You can also save your custom reports and export them to CSV. |
| Visual Design Studio | – | Pendo's interface for tagging Pages and Features and for positioning and styling guides. For more information, see Tagging with the Visual Design Studio and Get started with Visual Design Studio for Guides. |
| Weekly active users | WAU | The number of unique, active visitors in a week. See also DAU and MAU. |
| What you see is what you get | WYSIWYG | An editor system in which onscreen content (text and graphics) closely corresponds to its appearance when displayed as a finished product, which might be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. |
| Workflow | – | A behavior report in Pendo that's used to track visitor progress through expected tasks in your apps. Workflows identify completion rates from start to finish, helping you monitor progress across different applications and analyze completion patterns for specific visitor segments. For more information, see Workflows. |