How to use Analytics and Segments to uncover COVID-driven changes in your user base

As product managers navigate the new normal we find ourselves in, it’s more important than ever to understand users’ in-app behavior. Now, interactions with customers only happen digitally, which will inevitably impact how they engage with your product. In our latest webinar, Hannah Mullis from our professional services team walked through how to use Pendo’s Analytics and Segments features to identify changes to your product engagement, as well as any friction points and churn risks. 

The specific changes in product usage will vary from company to company, but we hope these best practices serve as a framework for how you can better serve your users during this time. Here are some of the top tips Hannah shared:

Start with the questions you want to answer

As you begin digging into product engagement, there are a lot of different approaches you can take. Above all, be sure you’re considering both quantitative and qualitative data points, so that you’re able to pair usage metrics (what users do) with things like feedback and sentiment (how users feel). 

At Pendo, we recommend starting by identifying the key questions you want to answer using analytics. These will depend on your business objectives, and if any new priorities have surfaced. Here are some questions analytics can help answer that may be especially relevant today:

• What does user traffic look like now versus a month ago?
• Are different features being used more or less?
• How can you build a visitor report to identify churn risks?
• What features do your users embrace? Which ones do they ignore?
• What features are valuable but underused?
• Is your guide as effective as you hoped?

To help answer these questions, a few different areas of Pendo will be useful:

Retention: are users coming back?

Many companies are now hyper-focused on retention and have even prioritized it over new customer acquisition. The Retention tab in Pendo is a great place to go to help answer questions like, “Are users returning to the product?” and “What does user traffic look like now compared to a month ago?” It’s valuable to not only know your sheer number of users, but if those users see value in your product and return after their first login.

In the Retention tab, users are grouped by cohort (which is based on their first visit to the product), and it shows the percentage of users who came back broken down by month. For larger organizations, it may be more effective to switch the Cohort Type to “Account” since you likely have many users from a single customer, but want to get an overall sense of the account’s retention.

Visualize usage patterns with Data Explorer

Pendo’s Data Explorer feature allows you to create data visualizations and reports, which is especially helpful when comparing different sets of data. Being able to see multiple sets of data in one place makes it easier to uncover usage patterns and trends — for example, if you create a guide prompting a new feature, you can use Data Explorer to track how feature usage has changed after users saw that particular guide.

Customize and share data easily using Dashboards

Chances are you’re not the only one who will benefit from the data and insights you’re gathering. With Dashboards, you can customize data dashboards and easily share them with other members of your team. For some teams, it might be useful to create a COVID-specific dashboard that tracks the metrics that are most relevant now (e.g. retention, stickiness, etc.).

Bonus tip: if you’re utilizing Goals to track feature and page usage over time, you can save it to a dashboard for a quick view into your progress.

Segmentation: group users for more powerful insights

Analytics are valuable on their own, but they can be even more valuable when you segment your user base and analyze usage by different groups. In Pendo, you can segment by either product usage (track events, feature usage, guide view data, etc.) or user metadata (role/persona, location, account type, etc.).

Segmentation also enables more targeted in-app communications to specific groups of users. For example, if you want to drive adoption for a particular feature, you can create a segment of users who haven’t used that feature in the last 60 days and then target an in-app guide to them that walks through the basics. If you have an NPS program, you could also segment by responses to your NPS poll and serve specific guides to your Detractors, or pass this information on to your customer success team.

Bonus tip: in order to use metadata in segmentation, you must already be collecting that data from users and passing it to Pendo. You can see what metadata you’re collecting from users by going to the Visitors tab and clicking on any visitor ID.

If you want to dig deeper and see all of this in action, watch the full webinar recording here:

Watch the replay