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.
- Have the Slack integration Send Pendo data to Slack enabled to share signals. See Connect Slack to Pendo for instructions on how to do this.
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.
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
Your homepage displays a carousel with different types of signals, including app-level signals and event-level adoption.
App-level signals can include visitor retention, account retention, and NPS.
- Visitor retention measures how many new visitors return to your application and compares your rates to industry benchmarks.
- 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.
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 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, 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, and events you care about most.
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.
- Under Source, choose which application you want to include in your signals.
- 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 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.
- 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
You can send signals to a Slack channel as a one-time message for an individual signal, or as a recurring digest that summarizes multiple signals.
For requirements and step-by-step instructions, see Share signals to Slack.