10 questions you can answer with Pendo data
Phase 1
Activation
Once you’ve successfully acquired users, the next critical stage is activation: ensuring those users understand your product’s value and continue to use it. Onboarding plays a central role in activation, making it crucial to reduce friction in the in-app onboarding experience.
How many active users do I have today, and in the last week and month?
This question will help you understand how often users are logging into your application, which signals whether or not the product is continuing to draw people in. While simple in nature, this question is a great place to start since it offers a baseline measure of product usage.
- On a blank or existing dashboard, click Add Widget to bring up the widget library
- Select the Visitor Overview widget
- There you will see the number of total active users for today, the number of daily active users (DAU) from yesterday, the number of weekly active users (WAU) from the last seven days, and the number of monthly active users (MAU) from the last 30 days
- Use yourself as a benchmark and take note of how your product’s daily, weekly, and monthly numbers change over time
- You can also view this data by account using the Account Overview widget, which is most applicable for enterprise applications where account activity is more important than individual visitor activity
How do users get around my product?
This is another way of asking: “What’s the user journey map?” Seeing how users explore your product will start to shed light on which features they’re spending time on, and which areas they’re discovering early on.
- Navigate to the Behavior tab in the left sidebar, then to Paths
- Select the page or feature from the relevant app that is a natural starting point for a user first coming into your product
- To start, keep the setting of showing paths that are “Starting from” the selected page or feature
- Choose the date range and segment, or user cohort, you’d like to view for this path (Pro tip: Segments are defined by a set of rules and provide cuts of data based on a variety of metadata attributes)
- Click Save & Run, and give this report a name
- Take note of the top features and pages that users tend to navigate to in a path, and ask yourself if these are what you’d expect based on your product’s value proposition
- If you have a mobile product, view mobile user journeys and observe any similarities or differences in the top features—similarities may signal that a feature or page is truly valuable to users
- View user journeys by different persona segments to understand if one group is moving through the product differently based on their unique needs
What are the core parts of your product?
Which features do users engage with the most?
Once you have a general sense of product usage, it’s helpful to narrow your focus and start to examine which parts of your product appear to be important for users—and if they match your expectations. These features represent where users are going to solve their problems, helping you understand if your onboarding and overall product experience are driving the right behaviors.
- From any dashboard, click Add Widget to bring up the widget library
- Select the Feature Adoption widget to see which features are driving the most interaction in your product
- Adjust the settings (date, segment, app) based on your needs (Pro tip: For the “Benchmark” setting, we recommend following the 80/20 rule and starting with 80% of feature clicks)
- Take note of the most-clicked features, and if those features are in a specific area of the product—this indicates that this part of the product may be the most valuable for your users
- Click Save & Run, and give this report a name
- Click on any feature in the table to view data for that specific feature, including the top visitors and accounts and the feature’s activity trends
- If you’ve set up Core Events, compare the list of most-used features to your list of Core Events to see if users are accessing the areas of the product you believe are most important
Are users finding important parts of the product quickly and easily?
Now that you know how users engage with the product and what the most important parts of your product are, you need to make sure users are finding those pages and features with as little friction as possible. For onboarding (and activation in general) to be successful, users need to find value in your product quickly and easily—otherwise, they might not come back.
- First, make sure you have your Core Events set up
- From any dashboard, click Add Widget to bring up the widget library
- Select the Core Events: Time To First Use widget to understand how quickly visitors first engage with each Core Event
- Adjust the settings (date, segment, app) based on your needs
- Take note of which Core Event takes the longest for users to engage with, which may indicate that it’s difficult for users find, or that it isn’t as important as you previously thought
- Compare different user segments to see how time to first use changes—you can even compare against a segment of your most engaged users and use that as a benchmark to work towards
- Identify any Core Events that show an increasing trend (indicated by the red up arrow) and investigate what tactics (or lack thereof) may be causing the increase in time
Phase 2
Adoption
Well-adopted products help users discover value quickly, keep those users coming back, and encourage habitual, regular usage as the product becomes part of their routine. Product usage data can help you determine how your product stacks up against this criteria, leaving you armed with actionable data that allows you to continuously improve your product experience.
Is usage of key features increasing or decreasing over time?
As customers continue using your product, you’ll want to ensure they’re continuing to interact with its key features—the ones you know correlate with outcomes like adoption and positive customer sentiment.
- From any dashboard, click Add Widget to bring up the widget library
- Select the Page/Feature Use Over Time widget to see trending data on page and feature activity
- Adjust the settings (date, segment) and select the pages and features you’d like to track
- Select the appropriate metric based on what’s most important for you to measure—Views/Clicks, Visitors, or Accounts
- Take note of any dips in page or feature usage and start to formulate potential hypotheses for a decrease in activity
- Use the Data Explorer widget to compare page and feature activity over time for different segments or time periods
- If you have a mobile app, you can also use the Data Explorer widget to compare web app usage against your mobile app to understand feature usage holistically
Which features and pages are users having trouble with?
After getting a sense of how users are finding value in the product, it’s useful to look at the opposite end of the spectrum: Where are users getting stuck? These users could be experiencing friction in their workflows for many reasons—maybe they can’t find what they came into the product looking for, or don’t understand how to navigate the platform.
- Navigate to the Behavior tab in the left sidebar, and then to Funnels
- Begin building your funnel by selecting the series of pages, features, or track events that you’d expect a user to engage with in sequential order
- To start, we recommend looking at the most common flow that applies to the broadest set of users
- Select the date range and segment based on your needs
- Click Save & Run, and give your report a name
- Take note of which step had the largest dropoff and begin to form hypotheses as to why users are abandoning the flow (Is it early on in the funnel or later on? What type of users are dropping off?)
- In the table, view the data in Time to Next Step to see how long it takes for users to move down the funnel—a longer time duration may point to potentially confusing steps within the workflow
Which features and pages do users ignore?
This helps you understand which parts of the product appear to be irrelevant for users, and can even reveal features that you eventually may want to sunset in order to reduce feature bloat and support costs. Similar to understanding which features users engage with the most, it’s also valuable to see if any features are getting in the way of effective product usage.
- Navigate to Product, and then to Pages (These are the pages in your app that are currently tagged)
- In the Pages table, sort by total Number of Visitors, Number of Accounts, Page Views, or Time Per Day to understand activity for each page
- Filter the data in the dropdowns above to see activity for a certain time period, or for a certain segment of users
- To understand activity for Features, repeat the above steps after navigating to Product, and then to Features
- Take note of any pages or features that have no activity over 90+ days, as these may be good candidates for a potential sunset
- Compare and contrast the above set of pages and features against your mobile app and consider a tandem sunset
Phase 3
Retention
A product’s ability to retain users has a direct impact on the company’s revenue, especially when the cost to acquire a customer can be greater than the initial contract value. Product analytics can help you determine where you stand, giving you a better sense of where to focus your retention efforts.
How frequently are active users coming back into the product?
Answering this question will reveal your product’s natural usage cadence, and also allows you to understand any differences in usage patterns between user segments or personas. Most importantly, you can monitor changes in their behavior over time.
- From any dashboard, click Add Widget to bring up the widget library
- Select the Stickiness widget
- Configure the Metric setting to best represent ideal usage for your product (For example, DAU/WAU for an enterprise application since it’s typically used on a weekly basis)
- Adjust the other settings (date, segment, app) based on your needs
- Take note of any unusual dips in the chart, and be sure to track average stickiness over time to see if it’s slowly increasing
- To see what your ideal stickiness should be, add a segment of your healthy customers (you will need to define what “healthy” means for your business) to the Stickiness widget, then compare that to your average stickiness
- If you have an accompanying mobile app, compare its stickiness against the web app and take note of any differences
How many users continue using the product in the first few months of usage?
At the highest level, retention data looks at user logins and tells you if your product is drawing users back in consistently. With this question, you’re able to see if first-time users within a specific timeframe (typically one month or one week) return to the product in subsequent time periods.
- Navigate to Behavior in the left sidebar, and then to Retention to view the Retention table
- In order to understand overall usage of the product, select All Activity and the relevant app under the Source setting
- In the Cohort Settings, select the Cohort Type and Size relevant for your product
- Adjust the segment and date range as needed
- Take note of each cohort and read across to see the percent of visitors that continue to return to the product after the start of the cohort
- Take note of any significant dropoffs or increases in retention and form a hypothesis around what may have caused them (For example, did you create a Pendo in-app guide to prevent users from leaving your product prematurely? Did your support team resolve issues that kept users from logging into your application?)
- Select a specific cell in the table to view lists of both retained visitors and dropped visitors—analyze the dropped visitors to identify any patterns, or build a Pendo in-app guide targeted to these users to re-engage them
How many users who interact with a key feature come back?
After analyzing user retention for your whole application, it’s useful to examine retention at the feature level, and specifically at an individual feature’s ability to keep users engaged. Ideally, the features you believe add value to the user experience will also correlate with continued usage of your product.
- Navigate to Behavior, and then to Retention to view the Retention table
- In order to understand feature retention, select a specific page, feature, or track event under the Source setting (instead of All Activity)
- In the Cohort Settings, select the Cohort Type and Size relevant for your product
- Adjust the segment and date range as needed
- The chart now reflects retention filtered by activity of the selected page, feature, or track event—take note of the impact of the selected page, feature, or track event on user retention
- Continue to select other features that you believe are high value—if they show low retention, you may want to consider using in-app guides to improve discoverability
- If you’ve recently launched a new feature, use the Retention chart to see if it’s helping to increase overall user retention (If it’s showing high retention, the feature may be a strong activation point that you want to drive new users to during onboarding)
See for yourself
