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 enrolled in the Signals beta. A subscription admin can enroll the subscription from the Beta Enrollment page.
- To create or manage your own recurring Signals digest, you must have access to the selected application. Admin permissions are required to share a one-time signal 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 and Features in that application, based on recent changes in usage.
- Select your preferred Frequency: daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
- Choose whether the digest uses your homepage data preferences or custom data preferences. For custom preferences, you can select an application, product area, segment, and events. A selected product area is saved with the digest and scopes future digest results.
To investigate a signal further, you can open it in Leo, which includes a prewritten prompt to help you explore what changed and why. Ask Leo is also available for product-area visitor-retention signals. When a signal is scoped to a product area, the prewritten prompt and structured query preserve that scope. If you also selected a specific app, Leo analyzes the intersection of the app and product area rather than dropping the product-area selection.
Explore Signals on your homepage
Your homepage displays a carousel with different types of signals, including app-level signals and event-level adoption.
The Signals analysis section also shows Visitor acquisition and Visitor adoption KPIs. Each KPI displays its current-period value and the percentage change from the previous equivalent period. These KPIs respect the apps, Product Areas, segments, and date range in your active lens. If you haven't selected a date range, they use the last 7 days and compare them with the preceding 7 days.
App-level signals can include visitor retention, account retention, NPS, and new visitors. New-visitor signals compare first-time visitor counts week over week. When you filter Signals by product area, the new-visitor signal is scoped to that product area and links to its details.
- New visitor retention measures how many new visitors return to your application and compares your rates to industry benchmarks. All visitor retention measures how many visitors overall return from one weekly cohort to the next. All visitor retention signals can be scoped to an app or Product Area and show the current returning-visitor count and the week-over-week change in retention rate.
- Account retention measures how many accounts return to your app compared to a previous period.
- Retention signals reflect cohort-based data. The signal compares how many visitors from a prior period returned in the following period, not activity from the last 7 days. For example, a signal shown today might reflect whether visitors from 7 to 14 days ago came back.
- NPS measures week-over-week changes in your Net Promoter Score.
Rage click signals use the total number of rage clicks as the headline value. The average number of rage clicks per visitor is shown alongside the total, including in signal highlights shared to Slack.
Event-level adoption signals highlight changes in adoption for tagged Pages and Features, including increases, decreases, and stable trends.
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 number of unique visitors who used the event, the change in adoption percentage 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, Feature, and Track Event 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
Your data preferences control which visitors and parts of your product Pendo uses to generate signals. Adjust them to focus signals on the segment, app, product area, and events you care about most. When you choose a product area, Pendo applies the selected app and product area together. Product area scope generates supported adoption and frustration signals, while app-only retention, acquisition, stickiness, and NPS signals aren't included.
How your preferences shape signals:
- App-level signals are always included and reflect the app you select as your source.
- Event-level signals are optional and reflect the individual events you select as you source. If you don't select any, Pendo shows the events with the biggest changes across your selected app.
- On your homepage under Your product signals, select Preferences.
- In the Data preferences section, select Edit.
- Under Segment, choose a segment from the dropdown menu. Signals analysis supports the built-in Everyone (Identified Visitors Only) and Everyone (Anonymous Visitors Only) segments when they're available for your subscription.
- Choose an application from the dropdown menu. If the Product Area dropdown is available, select a product area. The dropdown only lists product areas that have events in common with the selected application. Pendo saves this selection with your preferences, but it doesn't currently change which signals are generated.
- Under Selected events, select + Add or remove events.
- Select the checkbox next to each Page and Feature you want to include.
- Select Select events.
- Select Save changes to apply your preferences and 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 Leo with a prewritten prompt so that you can ask follow-up questions about what changed. You can view the conversation full page, in a side panel, or in a floating panel, and switch layouts while continuing the same conversation.
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.
- View NPS report. Opens the NPS overview for the survey used to compute the signal. Available for NPS signals.
- 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.
Share signals to Slack
Any Pendo user with access to the selected application can create and manage their own recurring Signals digest. Admins can also send one-time messages for individual signals.
For requirements and step-by-step instructions, see Share signals to Slack.
Note: To share to a private Slack channel, first add the Pendo bot to that channel. If the channel doesn't appear in the channel picker, select Refresh channels to load the latest channel list.