1. Orientation do’s and don’ts

Onboarding is a big part of the customer experience (CX), and while this is nothing new to anyone, implementing best practices around onboarding will ensure consistency and create measurable results. Maintaining proper use of Pendo in our organization starts with our onboarding process. We follow these dos and don’ts to continue accepting new Pendo users on LexisNexis simply and effectively:

DO: Identify the best person to be an admin so that the person leading an initiative (like tagging) is the right person for the job.

DO: Make sure you collect metadata for all accounts (including visitor accounts) that impact segmentation and reporting.

DON’T: Hash visitor ID and account ID. Hashing visitor IDs will cause problems when creating segments and identifying cross-application usage.

DON’T: Mark it immediately. It’s tempting to perform tagging activities with Pendo, but only admins should lead this process to ensure tagging consistency and adherence to best practices

2. Use data path attributes throughout the development process

We started by requiring that all interactive elements on our product pages add a data track attribute. The data path attribute provides additional information about the HTML element and provides additional context to the end user interaction And improve the marking process.

Successful data tracking attributes must be based on the element’s user functionality. To create a data tracking attribute for one of the ‘Create New Collection’ buttons in our Lexis+AI product, here are three great options:

• data-track=”create-new-collection”
• data-track=”create-new-collection-button”
• data-track=”create-new-collection-btn”

This option should make the function of track data attributes very clear. If you use data track attributes correctly, it will simplify your tags and improve tag stability.

3. Create and use consistent naming conventions for tagging

All Pendo users know that tagging is critical to how the platform delivers data. Clear tagging and naming conventions form the foundation of your data, and incorrect tagging will result in inaccurate data. At LexisNexis, we spend a lot of time creating and following best practice about five main marking areas.

Product area

Identify high-level categories or areas that represent different functional aspects of your product. Make sure you include a naming convention that capitalizes the first letter of each word and separated by a space. Remind admins to prioritize marking product areas before marking other areas.

Example: Search Page

Page

I recommend that every company have a consistent page naming convention. The convention we use starts with product areas, pages, and then subpages. We use Pendo Rule Generator, which shows the HTML elements and attributes available in the area you choose to tag. It also works well in identifying unique parts of a URL. Here’s an example:

Feature

As with pages, having a clear feature naming convention is critical. We knew early on a crucial mistake we were making in how we marked the buttons. In the beginning, we only tagged part of the button (the blue part) when we wanted everything to be tagged (the blue and green parts).

We found that the correct way of tagging is to tag buttons against anchors (Rule A) and not against ranges (Rule B).

Segment

Segments let you group visitors and accounts based on metadata and product usage so you can filter analytical data and target guides to specific users. We use specific naming conventions for our segments that include product areas, metric names, and qualifiers. Here’s an example:

Search Page – Time since first visit – < 30 days

Termination and deletion

We group deprecated data into four options: tier one, tier two, tier three, and deprecated. For data deletion, we always document whatever we delete and never delete anything used in the last three years.

4. Audit subscriptions

The last thing I will mention is the importance of audits. I worked with our technical account manager from Pendo to do a trial run of subscription audits across several accounts. He helped us conduct an audit of pages, features, and guides, and provided recommendations to the product team on how we could improve Pendo’s analytics.

After implementing his recommendations, we have improved the quality of Pendo’s analysis and gained more insight into our usage. So far, we’ve conducted five subscription audits. In the future, we plan to make the subscription audit global.

While there is always room for improvement, we have come a long way in standardizing our use of Pendo internally and getting the most out of the platform. Moving forward, I will continue to champion our governance efforts, build Pendo’s internal community, and promote our Pendo COE.

Get started building your own Pendo COE with a few tips from this support article or dive into it governance strategy for the Guide.