The Suggested Pages table generates recommended rules based on URLs from your event data. Use this feature to accept or delete the recommended rules to tag the pages that your visitors have seen in the last five days.
Functionality
The Suggested Pages table is populated based on recent events over the last five days. It shows the following:
- A suggested Page Name.
- The Include Rules that define what URLs would be included in each suggested Page.
- Up to five Sample URLs that are captured by the rule for the suggested Page.
- The Application that the Sample URLs come from.
- The Number of Views for each suggested Page using that rule.
A suggested Page can be associated with multiple URL visits. The Sample URLs list shows the top five URLs captured by the suggested Page rule as an expandable dropdown. This list isn't exhaustive. A Page rule could capture more URLs than listed under Sample URLs. If the list has fewer than five URLs, then these are all the URLs captured by the suggested Page rule.
Note: Users can tag a Page multiple times using the same rules. It's therefore possible for suggestions to include rules that are already implemented in other tagged Pages.
A red notification icon in the navigation menu indicates whether you have new suggested pages to review. If you don't want to see Suggested Pages, follow the instructions under Activate or deactivate Suggested Pages.
Use cases
Tagging pages is one of the fastest ways to view data from your app in a new Pendo subscription. You can recognize user behavior patterns as they navigate your app and begin to understand how many users are using your app, where they spend most of their time, and how frequently they return.
Tagging pages is a foundational step before you tag features and create guides.
Feature tags can be limited to only track clicks on certain pages. For example, a save button is a common element throughout your app. If you want to identify clicks on the save button on the New Account page, the feature tag can target the save button only on the New Account page you've already tagged.
Guides use tagged pages in a similar way. To set a guide to only display on a certain page, set the guide location to the tagged page instead of sitewide.
Requirements
- Pendo Admin users to enable setting and accept tags.
- Suggested pages enabled in App Details.
Activate or deactivate Suggested Pages
Suggested Pages are activated for each app individually in Subscription Settings > App Details. Turning Suggested Pages on for any application makes the Suggested Pages table visible to the entire subscription. The table only recommends tags for apps with Suggested Pages turned on.
- Navigate to Settings > Subscription.
- Find your application and select View App Details to see settings for that application.
- Use the checkbox next to Pendo Suggested Pages to turn Suggested Pages on or off.
Notifications for Suggested Pages
A red counter next to the Pages tab in Analytics indicates the number of pending suggested pages for all apps with Suggested Pages turned on.
You can turn notifications on or off for suggested pages at the user level. Navigate to Settings > Profile, and look for User Preferences where you can toggle on or off the following options:
- Suggested Pages Table. Toggling this setting off removes the table from the user’s view.
- Notifications. Toggling this setting off removes the red dot notifications, but keeps the Suggested Pages table.
Review Suggested Pages
Find Suggested Pages in Analytics > Pages. The Suggested Pages table shows all untagged pages that appeared in your events in the previous five days for both public and staging environments. If a suggested page isn't used in five days, it's dropped from the table until it's used again.
Suggested Pages haven't been tagged or processed yet. You can't see full retroactive analytics and you can't use suggested Pages in reports or tagging until after suggested Pages are tagged and data processing is complete.
The data you see in the Suggested Pages table can be different from the data you see when you tag them to add them to your Pages list. This is because the Suggested Pages table includes data from both your public and staging environments, whilst tagged Pages includes data only from your public environment.
The App filter limits which apps' pages appear in the Suggested Pages table in addition to filtering existing tagged pages.
Suggested page rules identify unique text in the URL, and build a rule based on that unique element, ignoring the rest of the URL. Depending on the structure of your app, a suggested rule might tag a single page or an entire area of your application. Both are good tags that provide meaningful data but it's important to know what a tagged page is capturing.
Long URLs with multiple sections might have multiple suggested pages in the table with different specificity.
Accept or delete Suggested Pages
- Look at the URL, rule, and number of views. This tells you what the suggested rule is tagging on your website and how much usage that page has gotten. It can be helpful to compare number of views to other similar suggested pages to see the specificity of different tags.
- Edit the name. Suggested pages provide a simple default name based on the URL. You can change the name to something more detailed or keep the default name.
- Accept the suggested page. Select Accept at the end of the row to begin processing page data. This moves the URL into the Pages list with a processing status.
- Delete the suggested page. This removes the suggested page from the table and doesn't suggest the URL and page rule again.
After tagging a page, processing can take up to an hour and data is typically visible in the UI at the top of the hour.
Understanding URLs and Suggested Page rules
Suggested Page rules use basic Pendo Page tagging rule syntax with text as well as forward slashes (/) for paths, asterisks (*) for wildcards, question marks (?) for queries, and hashtags (#) for fragments.
Wildcards and text define the values in the URL. The rule is used to search the URLs saved in your captured events, and to match the structure and values in the rule while ignoring wildcard values. Every time the rule matches the URL in a raw event, it's counted as a page view for that tagged page, and the associated Visitor, Account, and feature data is brought together.
For more information about page tagging and more complex manual page tagging rules in the, see the Understanding URLs for page tagging article.
Website URL anatomy
Page tagging rules match the structure of a website URL. A URL has several parts. For example: https://app.example.com/category/user/profile.html
- "https://" is the scheme. This tells Web servers what to do when they access a website.
- "app" is the subdomain. This groups different parts of a website that share a domain.
- "example.com" is the domain. This is the most recognizable part of the URL, and consists of two parts: the second-level domain and top-level domain; these are often combined and referenced together for simplicity.
- "category/user/profile.html" is the path. This identifies certain content or folders in the domain. Everything after the domain is the path.
- "/category/" is the subfolder, sometimes called a subdirectory or folder. It's just like a folder on your computer.
- "/profile.html" is a page. This is an endpoint with content. It can have different extensions for different file types or simply end with a forward slash.
Page rule anatomy
Page rules mirror this structure but they cut out the parts you don't need and identify the parts you do. Suggested page rules do this for you automatically. When you know the structure of your URL and what the rule is searching for, you can confirm that the page view data represents what you want to capture in that tag.
- The beginning of the rule always starts with //. This cuts off the scheme. The rest of the rule looks at everything after it: "//app.example.com/category/user/profile.html".
- The entire domain is skipped with a wildcard //*/. All events are coming from the app where your Pendo snippet is installed and a snippet for one app isn't typically installed on multiple domains: "//*/category/user/profile.html".
- This structure accounts for subdomains and other common configurations of the root URL. For example, dev.pendo.io, staging.pendo.io, and app.pendo.io might all have the same Pendo snippet as code promoted between environments, and all are simplified down to //*/ in the page tagging rule.
- You can add the the domain to a page rule for greater specificity if needed, but this isn't done automatically in suggested pages.
- A unique value is identified in the path, everything else is a wildcard: "//*/*/user". This rule matches every page URL that ends with the user folder.
- A unique value can be identified in the middle of a path and everything after is ignored: "//*/category/**". This rule matches every URL with category in the path. It includes /category, /category/user, /category/user/profile.html, and any other branches on the website that fit.
There isn't a right or wrong way to tag a page. Sometimes you want to group all usage in an area of your app in a single tagged page. Other times you want usage for a single page. You can tag both to see the data you want. Overlapping or duplicate tags won't compete, they'll both tag and count the same event.
Tip: For a real world example of overlapping tags, we have Pendo installed over our Help Center. The base domain support.pendo.io is tagged as a page to track usage of the entire website as a single page. Each article is also tagged as a page to track usage of a single article. Being able to target a single Pendo page that represents usage of the entire app is a Pendo shorthand that's helpful in segments and reports.