Guide effectiveness helps you assess guide engagement, completion, and goal tracking across your subscription. Use it to monitor how your guides are performing over time and compare them against a benchmark. The benchmark is a weighted average calculated across whichever guides match your current filters. This helps you spot trends, identify which guides are driving engagement, and find opportunities to improve your guides.
Guide effectiveness is particularly helpful when:
- You want to evaluate a guide's impact. Compare engagement, completion, and goal adoption rates to understand whether a guide is resonating with visitors or falling flat.
- You want to know which guides need work. Spot guides with low engagement or completion rates and use that data to prioritize updates before they affect visitor adoption.
- You've recently published a new guide. Track early engagement and completion trends to see whether visitors are interacting with it as expected.
- You want to measure goal adoption. Assess whether visitors are taking the intended action after viewing a guide, and use that data to inform future guide design.
This article covers how to use guide effectiveness to glean insights and make your guides more impactful.
Prerequisites
You must have Guides Pro.
Understand guide effectiveness
Guide effectiveness is located in the Guides module. To access it, go to the left-side menu and select Guides > Guides, then select the Effectiveness tab.
The Effectiveness tab allows you to analyze your guides using two views:
- Trends. Shows metrics for your guides over time based on the filters you've chosen. This is the default view when you open the Effectiveness tab.
- Performance. Shows how your guides perform relative to a benchmark that’s calculated using the weighted average of all the guides pulled based on what you have filtered.
Filters
Effectiveness uses the same global filter bar as the rest of Pendo. By default, the page shows data for all apps for the last 30 days. Use the filters to adjust your view. Both the Trends section and Guides list will update based on your filter selections.
| Filter | Description |
| Segment | Filter by visitor type, such as identified visitors only or anonymous visitors. |
| Date range | Filter by a predefined date range, or select Custom Range to specify a time period. |
| App | Filter guide performance by a specific application in your subscription. |
| Product Area | Filter by specific Product Areas. |
| Category | Filter by specific guide categories. |
| Status | Filter by the status of the guides you want to view, such as published or inactive. |
| Pages | Filter by specific pages where the guide is launched from. |
| Activation type | Filter by specific activation type. (For example, guides that are launched automatically or when a specific element is selected.) |
Trends tab
The Trends section shows the total number of guides that match your current filter selections, along with six key metrics on guide views and visitor interactions. The metrics update automatically when you change your filters. The percentage next to each metric shows the increase or decrease compared to the previous equivalent time period. For example, if you're viewing the last 30 days, it compares to the 30 days before that.
Metrics for trends include:
| Metric | Description |
| Total views | Shows the number of times these guides were viewed, including repeat views by the same visitor. |
| Total first-time views | Shows the total number of visitors who saw the guides for the first time. |
| Total visitors | Shows the total number of unique visitors who viewed these guides. Visitors who saw multiple guides are only counted once. |
| Average goal adoption rate | Shows the percentage of visitors who reached the goal across these guides. Only includes guides with a goal set. Guides with more visitors have a greater impact on this rate. |
| Average engagement rate | Shows the percentage of visitors who interacted with a guide element, excluding the close button, dismiss, and snooze actions. Only includes guides with at least one non-closing action. Guides with more visitors have a greater impact on this rate. |
| Average completion rate | The percentage of visitors who started a multi-step guide and viewed the final step. Only includes guides with more than one step. Viewing the final step is counted as a completion, regardless of whether the visitor took any action. |
Note: A guide goal tracks whether visitors interact with a specific Feature, Page, or Track Event after viewing a guide. You set the goal when creating or editing the guide. Guides without a goal don't contribute to the average goal adoption rate.
Select a metric to populate a trending chart to visualize the metric for those guides over time.
Trends guides list
Below the chart is a list of guides that meet the criteria of what you have filtered. Select the checkbox next to any guide to recalculate the metrics for the selected guides and add them as comparison lines on the trend chart baseline. When you select guides, the Trends section updates to show the selected guide count.
Use the search field above the list to find a specific guide. To customize the columns, select the Manage columns icon. To export the data, select the Download CSV icon in the top-right corner of the list. The list loads 50 guides at a time and paginates for larger sets.
Available columns include:
- Guide name
- Status
- Guide category
- Views
- Visitors
- Goal adoption
- Engagement rate
- Completion rate
Using manage columns, you can add the following columns: Description, Target segment, Target Page, Product Area, Started, Expired, Last updated, Last updated by, Created, Created by, Activation methods, Polls, and Step count.
Note: If you can't find the guide you're looking for, try adjusting the filters at the top of the page. The guides list is driven by your filter selections.
Performance tab
Performance shows how your filtered guides compare against a benchmark average. For more information about the calculation, see the Benchmark section of this article. Filters work the same way as they do on the Trends tab. The Performance tab displays three of the same metric cards: Average goal adoption rate, Average engagement rate, and Average completion rate. For more information on how these metrics are calculated, see the Trends section of this article. The visualization also changes from a line graph to a scatterplot.
Scatterplot
The scatterplot visualizes your filtered guides using two metrics: visitor count on the x-axis and performance as a percentage above or below the benchmark on the y-axis. This gives you context for each guide's performance. For example, if your average engagement rate is 3%, the benchmark helps you understand whether that's strong or weak compared to your other guides.
Note: The scatterplot only includes guides that have data for the selected metric. For example, if you select Average goal adoption rate, only guides with a goal defined appear on the chart.
- Guide visitors: x-axis. Plots the number of unique visitors who saw each guide in the selected date range, compared to the median visitor count across your filtered guides. The axis uses a logarithmic scale so guides with very different visitor counts can appear on the same chart. A vertical dashed line marks the median visitor count.
- Performance vs. benchmark: y-axis. Plots each guide's performance as a percentage above or below the benchmark for the selected metric. A positive value means the guide is performing above the benchmark; a negative value means it's performing below. A horizontal dashed line marks the benchmark threshold.
Select any guide on the scatterplot to highlight the corresponding row in the guides list below. Hover over any guide to see its value for the selected metric and its total visitor count. When you select a guide, non-selected guides appear faded so your selections are easier to compare.
Note: If fewer than 10 guides match your current filters, the median and benchmark lines aren't shown because there aren't enough guides to make the comparison meaningful.
Benchmark
The benchmark is calculated using a weighted average across all guides that match your current filters. Rather than treating every guide equally regardless of size, this method gives more weight to guides with more visitors. For example, a guide seen by 5,000 visitors has more influence on the benchmark than one seen by 50.
This answers the question: On average, how often do my visitors engage with and complete my guides?
For each metric, we add up the numerators (for example, the number of visitors who completed a guide) and divide by the sum of the denominators (the total number of visitors who started it) across all eligible guides.
Benchmark rate = total completions across all guides ÷ total eligible visitors across all guides
Guides are only included in the benchmark calculation if they have data for the selected metric. For example, if you select Average goal adoption rate, only guides with a goal defined contribute to the benchmark.
Colors
Each guide is color-coded based on whether it performs above or below the benchmark for the selected metric.
| Color | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Blue | Above expected performance for the selected metric |
| Orange | Below expected performance for the selected metric |
| Gray | Average expected performance for the selected metric |
Quadrants
The scatterplot is divided into four quadrants that help you interpret each guide's position:
| Quadrant | Location | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Engaging | Top left | High performance relative to the benchmark, but low visitor count. These guides are resonating well with the audience that sees them. Low views may be intentional. If this guide is segmented to a small audience, that's working as expected. If it's meant for a broader audience, it may not be getting the visibility it deserves and is worth investigating. |
| Lead performers | Top right | High performance relative to the benchmark and high visitor count. These guides are both effective and widely seen. These guides are worth modeling when you're looking to improve others. |
| Underperforming | Bottom left | Below-benchmark engagement and low visitor count. These guides have limited reach and aren't connecting with the audience that does find them. Since traffic is already low, focus first on improving the content itself: clarity, structure, and relevance before investing in driving more visitors to them. |
| Potential opportunities | Bottom right | Below-benchmark performance despite high visitor count. These guides are reaching a large audience but not motivating action. Because traffic is already high, even small improvements to content or calls to action can have a big impact. These are your highest-leverage opportunities. |
Performance guides list
Below the scatterplot is a list of guides that match your current filter selections. Select the checkbox next to any guide to highlight it on the scatterplot and make non-selected guides appear faded. You can also select a guide directly on the scatterplot to highlight the corresponding row in the list.
For search, column customization, reordering, export, and pagination, the guides list works the same way as the Trends guides list.