Pendo Signals helps you understand user behavior without building reports. Signals are generated automatically from your Pendo data and appear on your homepage. With Signals, you can identify trends in retention, adoption, engagement, and frustration, investigate changes in Leo, and share insights to Slack as one-time messages or recurring digests.
Requirements
To use Signals, you must:
- Use your personalized homepage (no home dashboard set).
- Have Leo activated in your subscription settings. A subscription admin can do this from Settings > Subscription settings > AI access.
- Be a subscription admin to set up and share signals to Slack.
- Have access to authorize integrations to Slack.
How signals work
Signals are generated automatically from your product usage data, with no setup required. They appear in a carousel on your homepage, highlighting changes in retention, adoption, engagement, and frustration.
By default, signals use your subscription’s default application. Event-level signals highlight the largest increases and decreases in adoption for tagged Pages, Features, and Track Events in that application, based on recent changes in usage.
If you select a specific segment or events, Pendo saves your preferences and uses them to generate signals going forward. Signals typically refresh once each day.
To investigate a signal further, you can open it in Leo, which includes a prewritten prompt to help you explore what changed and why.
Explore Signals on your homepage
On your homepage, the Your product signals carousel surfaces automatically generated insights from your Pendo data. Each card highlights a meaningful change and includes a summary, key metric, and actions for next steps.
Signals are grouped into app-level signals (trends for the application as a whole) and event-level signals (trends for tagged Pages, Features, and Track Events you include in your preferences). Filter pills above the carousel show your current Segment, App, and Events selections.
App-level signals can include:
- Retention. Measures whether new visitors or accounts return to your application over time. Retention signals use cohort-based, week-over-week comparisons. They compare how many users from one period returned in the next period—not total activity in the last 7 days. For example, a signal shown today might reflect whether visitors from 7 to 14 days ago came back. You may see separate cards for Visitor retention and Account retention when account-level analytics are enabled for your subscription.
- Visitor adoption. Measures how the total number of visitors in your application changed compared to the previous 7-day period—for example, whether overall visitor volume is trending up or down.
- Visitor engagement. Measures the average time spent per visitor in your application and how that changed compared to the previous 7-day period.
- Visitor frustration. Measures the average number of rage clicks per visitor in your application and how that changed compared to the previous 7-day period.
Event-level adoption signals highlight changes in adoption for tagged Pages, Features, and Track Events in your selected application. Individual cards are labeled Page adoption, Feature adoption, or Track event adoption.
For each event, adoption means the percentage of your app’s unique visitors who used that Page, Feature, or Track Event during a 7-day period. Event-level adoption signals can show:
- Trending up. Adoption increased compared to the previous period.
- Trending down. Adoption decreased compared to the previous period.
- Highest new-visitor adoption. The Page, Feature, or Track Event with the highest adoption among new visitors (from your selected events, or from your application if none are selected).
Cards show the current adoption rate, the change from the previous period, and a short summary. If your subscription includes Session Replay and you have Replay User permissions, Watch replays is available for Page and Feature adoption signals and for Visitor frustration signals.
If no signals appear yet, your app may still be collecting data. Signals typically become available after your app has collected 14 days of data. Manage your data preferences to choose which segment, application, and events are included.
Manage data preferences
To update which segment, application, and events are used to generate signals:
- On your homepage, select Manage preferences.
- In the Data preferences section, select Edit.
- Choose an application from the dropdown menu.
- Choose a segment from the dropdown menu.
- Under Selected events, select + Add or remove events.
- Select the checkbox next to each Page, Feature, and Track Event you want to include.
- Select Select events, then select Save changes to apply your preferences.
- Select Exit in the top‑right corner to return to your homepage.
Your selections remain in place until you update them.
Investigate and act on signals
From each signal on your homepage, you can investigate what changed or take action to share and explore further.
Investigate a signal with Leo
To investigate a signal, select Ask Leo in the bottom-right corner. This opens our conversational AI, Leo, in a right-side panel with a prewritten prompt. You can then ask follow-up questions to learn more about the trend.
Take action on a signal
To take action directly from a signal:
- Select Actions at the bottom of the signal.
- Choose from one of the following options:
- View retention report. Opens a pre-populated retention report in a new tab. Available for app-level retention signals if your subscription includes the Analytics module. For more information on analyzing and saving a retention report, see Retention report basics and Retention.
- Watch replays. Opens the replay player with a queue of visitors interacting with the related event. Available for event-level adoption signals if your subscription includes Session Replay and you have Replay User permissions. For more information on the replay player, see Watch replays.
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Share to Slack. Sends the signal to a selected Slack channel if you've connected Slack to Pendo. Available to subscription admins only.
Share signals to Slack
Subscription admins can share signals to Slack in two ways:
- Recurring digests that summarize multiple signals.
- One-time messages for individual signals.
Connect Slack to Pendo
Before sharing signals, an admin must set up the Slack integration. This integration is shared across Signals on your homepage and Trends on event list pages.
- From the top-right corner of Pendo, go to Settings > Integrations.
- Select Slack. This opens a panel on the right side of the screen.
- Under Slack for Pendo Trends, select Set up and activate.
- Select New authentication.
- In the window that opens, choose a Slack channel to complete authentication. This selection doesn’t affect where you can send Slack digests later.
- Select Allow to authorize the integration and return to Pendo.
- Select Finish to activate the integration.
Set up a Slack digest
Create a recurring digest to send a summary of signals to a Slack channel on a regular schedule. Only one active digest is supported.
- Select Get updates in Slack on your homepage. Alternatively, select Manage preferences, then open the Slack digest tab.
- Under Slack digest, select + Set up digest.
- Enter a Name for the digest. This appears at the top of the digest for everyone in the selected Slack channel.
- Select your preferred Frequency: weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
- Search for and select the Channel where you want to send updates. The dropdown list includes all public channels in your Slack workspace.
- Select Save to activate your digest.
Share a single signal to Slack
To send a one-time message for a specific signal:
- On any signal, select Actions > Share to Slack.
- Select the Slack channel where you want to send the signal.
- Select Send.
Manage Slack digests
After you set up a Slack digest, you can change the name, frequency, and channel of the digest, or turn it off.
- Select Get updates in Slack above your signals, or select Manage preferences, then open the Slack digest tab.
- Next to the digest, select the ellipsis (three dots).
- If you want to edit, select Edit, then make and save your changes.
- If you want to turn off the digest, select Turn off, then confirm.