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Planning Your Pendo Installation

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Overview

Planning your Pendo Adopt install will help your team accurately capture all of the visitor and account metadata you'll need to get a complete understanding of employee behavior in your applications.

Developer's Installation Guides

Installation Process

First, you need to select the metadata associated with visitors in your application. Talk to your IT team about the values that are available. 

  1. Pick visitor IDs

  2. Select other metadata you want to attach to your visitor IDs.

  3. Review PII, Security, and Performance

Pick Visitor IDs 

Pendo displays information at the individual level, visitors.

The visitor is an individual unique user. These are users you can identify based on how they signed up or logged in to your product. A visitor ID is typically email or a unique number. This is different from an account, which is a collection of multiple visitors. Anonymous visitors are also supported with cookies.

Before installing Pendo, determine what you will use as your visitor ID. This is crucial as the visitor ID will be your source of truth for who a visitor is and how you will follow them for their entire product journey. All other fields can change as you learn how you want to use Pendo, but the visitor ID cannot be changed without losing product usage and guide history data for user's prior to the date it's changed. 

There are many areas of Pendo where visitor IDs are the readable name in analytics and reports. Email address is generally the easiest unique visitor ID available that will be recognizable in Pendo and accessible in Pendo reports or CRM products for creating custom segments.

Some ID Examples

Visitor:
UID with environment specifier - prod-100001
Hashed email address - 2cf24dba5fb0a30e26e83b2ac5b9e29e1b161e5c1fa7425e73043362938b9824
UUID - d6beaf08-c632-11ea-87d0-0242ac130003

 

Warning: The visitor ID value should not be changed after the user has initialized Pendo the first time and generated a visitor record. If the visitor ID value changes, a new visitor record will be created with new product usage history and no guide view history. You will retain all your previous analytics with the old visitor ID but the visitor record will be recreated with the new visitor ID and no connection to the previous ID. They will have a new first login date, they will see all automatic Guides that target them again, and they will restart any onboarding checklists.

Selecting Other Metadata

You'll probably need more than just visitor ID to get meaningful segmentation and guide targeting. Most apps collect additional information about their users to better understand who is using the product. All of that data can be used for better analytics and engagement in Pendo.

We recommend that you send us anything you might use to segment your visitor data. Keep other departments in mind too. Check in with other departments and find out what their reporting and in-app messaging needs are.

Examples of Visitor Metadata
  • Unique Visitor ID
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Email Address
  • User Permissions (ie. admin, user, read-only)
  • Role or Title
  • Department

PII and Security

Read more here.

Next Steps After Install

Invite other users to use Pendo as soon as possible to help setup your subscription. User roles will help you give new users the access they need to contribute while protecting your subscription settings.

Install FAQ

Why do universally unique IDs matter?

These IDs identify each visitor. If any of these are duplicated, multiple users’ data will be aggregated under a single ID.

Why does metadata matter?

Metadata allows you to create powerful Segments that yield rich insights and personalize guides. You will be able to segment visitors based on any information that is passed to Pendo. 

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