Tagging captures valuable data across your product, but not all Features, Pages, and Track Events are equally important. Core Events represent key actions that drive value for your product.
It's important to tag Features, Pages, and Track Events throughout your application to get a detailed picture of user behavior and analyze workflows, but it's easy for critical user behavior to get lost in the noise. A Core Event signifies a visitor's meaningful engagement with your app. This could range from actions like following or sharing, to viewing vital pages, or completing significant workflows with actions like saving or publishing.Using these features demonstrates that visitors are realizing the value of your app, increasing the likelihood of their return and continued usage.
Tip: To distinguish your Core Events from the rest of the data, start by identifying what you believe to be your Core Events. Validate these assumptions by ensuring that engagement with these Core Events leads to above-average retention by using the Account Retention by Usage widget. Additionally, monitor user interactions with these Core Events using the Time to First Use widget.
Core Events are integrated throughout Pendo to facilitate in-depth analysis within Pendo reports. Continuously evaluating your Core Events, correlating their usage with sustained activity, and encouraging users to engage with Core Events early in their journey allows you to focus on developing and promoting the aspects of your product that resonate most with customers.
Set up Core Events
Before you set up your Core Events, ensure the Features, Pages, and Track Events that you want to designate as core are already tagged.
To access Core Event setup, an Admin must select Manage Core Events from the top of the Features, Pages, Track Events, or PES page.
If none of your apps have Core Events set up yet, you're presented with an introduction page that provides a high-level overview of Core Events, their benefits, and how to identify your Core Events. Select Get Started with Core Events in the bottom-right corner of the page.
The Set Up Core Events screen allows you to select Core Events for each app in your subscription. Select an app to view the currently selected Core Events, a counter indicating how many Core Events are selected (up to ten), and the selector for adding new Core Events to that app.
Open the Select a Page, Feature, or Track Event dropdown and select a tagged event from the list. Repeat for up to ten events in each app. After you select all Core Events for each app, select Save & Exit.
If you need to remove or replace a Core Event, return to this page, hover over the relevant event, then select the Remove (x) icon. Add another event if needed, and save your changes. When removing a Core Event, this simply removes the designation of the tagged Page, Feature, or Track Event as a Core Event, which can impact your PES, but doesn't remove the event from Pendo or impact any other usage data.
Validate Core Events
If you set up the Retention by First Use dashboard widget to measure Core Events, it shows the rate of retention for accounts if they use a Core Event in the first 30 days. Your Core Events should be the actions that lead to happy users habitually returning to your application. Using a Core Event in the beginning of an account's lifecycle should result in above-average retention when compared to the control line. The control line is the average retention for accounts who have any events.
If this widget doesn't show that Core Event usage leads to above-average retention over time, it's possible you selected the wrong Core Events and the accounts you're retaining are using different features. Replace the below-average Core Event with a different Page, Feature, or Track Event that might produce better retention. Accounts must use a Core Event in the first 30 days of their activity and have an account start date during the account retention date range to be eligible for this analysis.
For more information about this dashboard widget, see Measure retention by first use.
Drive users to value
If you set up the Time to First Use dashboard widget to measure Core Events, it shows the average time it takes users to use a Core Event for the first time. After confirming that using a Core Event results in above-average retention, you want users to discover those features as soon as possible.
This widget shows the mean, median, minimum, and maximum time to first use for all qualifying users. Steer your messaging, onboarding, and product design toward improving time to first use and see if using your Core Events improves retention for more of your accounts. Users must use a Core Event after their first visit to be included in this analysis.
For more information about this dashboard widget, see Measure time to first use.
View Core Events in analytics
Core Events are prioritized in dropdown menus and highlighted in lists for ease of use and accurate selection of Core Events throughout Pendo. It's important to use Core Events in the other analyses you do in Pendo.
Tip: There's value in all roles in your organization tracking Core Event usage and adoption, not just product managers. Customer success managers can track their accounts' Core Event usage to make sure they're finding the value of your product. Data scientists can look for patterns around Core Event usage and non-usage. Designers can build guide experiences that direct the user journey to Core Event usage.
Core Events are sometimes separated from other Features, Pages, and Track Events when selecting an event from a list, such as in Data Explorer, segments, and visitor and account reports.
To help distinguish Core Events from other tagged events, the Features, Pages, and Track Events pages contain a Core Event table column and use a Core badge on the details page for any events indicated as core. Sort the table by selecting the Core Event column to quickly find all Core Events in the table.