Exclude Guides from running during automated testing
For excluding automation from guides, Pendo suggests either of the following:
- Excluding Guides for Visitors and Accounts -- If it's possible to have all of your automation "users" be identified with the same account, we can enable this feature and mark that account as ‘Excluded from guides'. That will prevent any visitor within that account from receiving guides at any point.
Note that, for this to work, those visitors must always be identified with a guides excluded account.
- Active Segmentation -- If it's not possible to easily collect automation visitors within an account, we suggest appending a consistent identifier of some kind in the snippet. This can range from a simple prefix on the visitor ID (i.g. QA-AUTO_VISITORID) to a new metadata field (i.g. isAutomationUser: true,). Once those visitors are identified, you can include a segmentation row to exclude these users from your guides:
Visitor ID | does not contain | QA-AUTO-
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Comments
yeah we include in our segments a note about visitor ID not containing "automat" to add another layer of exclusion
We are seeing guides show up in staging that we have segmented to avoid automation tests. Should segment rules apply equally whether viewed in staging or production?
Hey Eric Miller! Segment rules do apply equally in staging vs. prod, so I suspect there's something else going on.
You mentioned you're using segments, but it's worth calling out just in case: if you've put your automation users on the exclude list, that alone will not prevent them from seeing guides. They'll need to be either excluded from the guide segment (segment troubleshooting tips here), or via the "Hide guides from this visitor" checkbox under Visitor Details (this can also be done at the account level). If you don't see that option, your CSM can help enable it for you.
Can you provide syntax on excluding people with a certain email address? I can't figure out how to get this to work? Do I use " or not do I use * or not?
If you are trying to block a specific user from guides, then you need to make sure your account has the functionality to hide guides on the visitor or account level enabled (see your CSM). Once enabled you can check a box in their details to hide guides.
You can wildcard out users by email domain from analytics but not guides. The only way to use email domain to exclude users from guides is through segmentation. In the segment you could make a rule such as username or email "does not contain xyz.com"
Another method for accomplishing this is to initialize Pendo differently for each group using conditional logic. This would require assistance from your developers to modify the Pendo installation.
Below is an overly simplified example:
As described in our documentation here, you can add disableGuides:true to the initialize statement to prevent Pendo guides from displaying. So you would initialize with one version of the Pendo snippet for your automation users where disableGuides:true, and for everyone else, you would initialize with the original Pendo snippet.
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