Recipe: Create a Foundational Data Layer

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Overview

Creating a foundational data layer is a critical prerequisite for unlocking value with Pendo. To maximize and optimize your investment in Pendo, it’s important to accurately capture and organize insights so that you have a single source of truth for your product’s usage data across your organization. 

 In addition to democratizing data across your organization, this makes it simple to maintain a holistic view of your customer base and identify value drivers within your product. 

Positive Business Outcomes:

  • Ability to cohort and persona your customers
  • Ability to identify value drivers within the product
  • Develop data-driven roadmap tied to ROI
  • Ability to quantify resource investment
  • Ability to democratize data across an organization  

 

How to Do It

Delegating responsibilities

  1. Pendo makes your product usage insights accessible to your entire company, but it’s important to define a few different roles for users focusing on the initial implementation to make this information easy to digest over time. 
  2. Decide on who is responsible for tagging new pages or features and maintaining the nomenclature and organization to avoid duplicate tags or confusion. 

 

Organize your pages and features

  1. Use Groups to define the different areas of your product (Dashboard, Reports, etc). This serves as an easy way to filter to a certain set of page and feature tags once they have a Group designated. This will also provide macro-level analytics insights on the group when looking at the Groups page
  2. Define a naming convention for tagged pages and features so new Pendo users can find insights easily. Groups will help the user narrow to a certain area of the product, and many Pendo users find success using a tiered naming system within the Page or Feature title. When tagging a new Page or Feature, this takes the form of “Report Builder > Edit Report > Save Button” to more accurately describe the tag than a title like “Save Button” would. Find more information in our Naming Best Practices article.
  3. Appoint one or more people to tag new entities so the convention is maintained or have someone periodically review the tags if you want a larger group of users to be able to tag. 

 

Metadata Setup and Use Cases

Metadata is information that you provide to Pendo about the Visitors and Accounts of your application. Most metadata is included in your installation snippet and only needs to be configured once as it updates every time a new page is loaded for one of your end users. You can add more metadata at any time in the future too. 

 

Metadata allows you to gain better insights and target specific audiences via segmentation. This document provides examples of metadata you might want to provide to Pendo to enable more use cases.  You can also pass information in from our direct integration with Salesforce or via API calls

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Admins can review the state of metadata on the Data Mappings page. Confirm that all expected metadata is flowing into Pendo and that the field name accurately reflects its purpose. If you have a larger set of metadata, it could be beneficial to create a wiki or document for your organization outlining definitions of each field and how it might be used in Pendo.

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Identify Key Features

  1. Identify a few key features that you know users get value from and keep them coming back to your application. 
  2. If you already know these key features, you can begin using segmentation to understand who is and isn’t completing the actions you expect. 
    • Develop segments to define users that have or haven’t used a specific feature. You can then begin to understand how these populations use the application differently or target the users that aren’t engaged directly with a guide to drive behavior. Create_Segment_Avery.png
  3. If you don’t know your key features, you can use tools like the Feature Adoption Analysis Widget on the dashboard to begin to discover what users are most commonly interacting with. 

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Set Up a Shared Dashboard

  1. Shared dashboards help to develop a single source of truth for your product usage information. All of your Pendo users can consume the same insights from a highly customized dashboard that only needs to be built once. 
  2. The creator of the dashboard is the only person that is able to edit it. All other users gain read-only access to the dashboard via a URL. It will then appear in their dashboards list.

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Further Reading

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