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For years, we’d hear the same feedback over and over: "I love building in Appcues, but when it's time to show what my experiences actually did, I have to stitch reporting together manually, or use another tool."
We heard you. So we spent the last few months doing something about it.
Analytics is now live in the new Appcues! Berni Fisher (our Head of Product and Engineering) and I spent an hour walking through all the bells and whistles in the first Cued In webinar, our new monthly deep-dive series for customers.
This article is the recap for everyone who couldn’t make it, a look into how I’ve been using Analytics in my marketing work, and a look at what early-access customers are saying.
In our minds, a good analytics tool has three jobs that have to work together:
Most tools stop at visualization, leaving you to squint at a chart going "huh, that's weird." Appcues Analytics connects what you build all the way through to what customer behavior patterns really mean.
"looker needs to take a freaking page out of your book because this was super quick and so amazing" –– Sara from Buildium, early access customer
Product work is messy, and single events don’t go as far for planning as they used to.
Key moments are our new way to define your specific milestones that matter most for your growth. A key moment pairs more than one event with a set of conditions, then fires every time a user meets your criteria. In the webinar, Berni shows one of our new key moments for onboarding Appcues users: "activated in the new app" fires when an account has done both of the core actionsthat mean a user is activated in our product, and only counts the first time it happens.
Before you jump into build mode, step back and define the moments you're trying to drive. What combination of behaviors means someone is truly onboarded? What does it mean for someone to have ‘adopted’ or ‘get value’? Define these outcomes first. That way, you have clarity and focus to build your understanding on.
With key moments taking center stage on data collection, it’s more than likely you’ll discover new events you’ll need to include that you’re not tracking yet. But here’s a pain: you set up a track event, and data collection starts from that moment forward. That data is gone FOREVER.
Until now. Enter enhanced event tracking.
The new Appcues now captures user behavior passively behind the scenes — even that behavior you just learned you needed for your key moments. When you're ready to use an event in your targeting, experiences, or reporting, you create the track event exactly the way you always have in Studio, and the history backfills automatically to this past July when we launched the capability, or to your Appcues install date, if you installed post-July.
Our goal here is to remove some pressure. You no longer have to sit down before every launch and play "guess every event I might ever need". The data is already there, so even if your strategy changes you’re never starting from scratch.
Data visualization is only as good as how your dashboard is built. And in Appcues, there are three ways to create and personalize your view.
Build manually. Add your metrics charts, funnels, retention and cohort analysis, line charts, bar charts, tables, breakdowns, targets, segment comparisons, date filtering, you name it. This full toolkit lives right beside your experiences. If you've been living the export-it-to-a-spreadsheet-and-pray workflow, this will save you countless headaches and manpower.
Prompt. You can now ask for a dashboard in plain language. Berni built our new product usage dashboard that our executive team uses through a back-and-forth conversation with Appcues AI. She started with a rough prompt, reviewed what it built, and refined from there. She also built a full weekly cohort retention dashboard starting from a single pre-canned "analyze retention" prompt on the home screen, then added comparison cards on the fly just by asking.
As the resident non-metrics person, I cannot overstate what a gift this is. I tell Appcues what I'm trying to measure, and it either builds the thing or asks me smart questions until we get there together.
Auto-generate with campaigns. When you organize your experiences into a campaign around an objective and a key moment, a dashboard comes with it — reach, uplift, conversion over time, objective completion by tactic. If you're an existing customer with experiences scattered across flows, banners, and pins, ask Appcues to gather the ones related to a launch or an onboarding motion, organize them into a campaign, and suggest an objective. The dashboard shows up as part of the deal, and you'll see the holistic impact of everything you've shipped toward one outcome.
Dashboards now come in personal and team flavors. Every dashboard starts as a personal view, so you can tinker in peace, and share it with the rest of the team when it's ready for more eyes.
Charts are great, but a picture only gets you to "huh, that's interesting." The analysis layer is what gets you to "here's what to do about it."
You can ask Appcues AI "how is this campaign performing, and where should I optimize?" and get back a genuine breakdown with a campaign-level summary, tactic-by-tactic detail, and prioritized recommendations. And it will call out when something goes wrong.
Berni noticed our stickiness metric had dropped on a dashboard and asked Appcues AI to help her understand why. Within a couple of minutes, it came back with an answer. A specific event had stopped firing around July 21st. She took that straight to our engineers, who confirmed something had in fact broken, and a fix was underway. A real bug was surfaced by one casual question that might have gone unnoticed for who knows how long.
I live in the new Appcues every single day, and analytics has changed how I work in ways I didn't expect:
This is the first release, and the team is already building on it: Sankey pathing (Berni got a preview and is mildly losing her mind about it), out-of-the-box evergreen dashboards for retention and user behavior, dashboard notifications, and account-level reporting so you can see activation at the account level instead of just the user level.
If you're already in the new Appcues: go poke at this today. Try one of the pill prompts on the home screen, or just tell Appcues what you're trying to measure and let it take it from there.
If you're not in yet, let's fix that. Reach out to your CXM or get in touch with us directly and we'll get you access. That way you can see what your data looks like in the new Appcues Analytics. Customers can also drop into our office hours — every Friday at 10am ET — with any questions, or keep an eye out for ProCues where you can register for the next Cued In on September 30th, where we're going deep on campaigns and tactics.
And if you build a dashboard you're proud of, send it to me. Seriously. Seeing what you all create and sharing it is my favorite part of this job.
For those who aren’t Appcues customers but still want to see what this looks like, check out the webinar or sit down with our team on a demo!
Product Adoption
For years, we’d hear the same feedback over and over: "I love building in Appcues, but when it's time to show what my experiences actually did, I have to stitch reporting together manually, or use another tool."
We heard you. So we spent the last few months doing something about it.
Analytics is now live in the new Appcues! Berni Fisher (our Head of Product and Engineering) and I spent an hour walking through all the bells and whistles in the first Cued In webinar, our new monthly deep-dive series for customers.
This article is the recap for everyone who couldn’t make it, a look into how I’ve been using Analytics in my marketing work, and a look at what early-access customers are saying.
In our minds, a good analytics tool has three jobs that have to work together:
Most tools stop at visualization, leaving you to squint at a chart going "huh, that's weird." Appcues Analytics connects what you build all the way through to what customer behavior patterns really mean.
"looker needs to take a freaking page out of your book because this was super quick and so amazing" –– Sara from Buildium, early access customer
Product work is messy, and single events don’t go as far for planning as they used to.
Key moments are our new way to define your specific milestones that matter most for your growth. A key moment pairs more than one event with a set of conditions, then fires every time a user meets your criteria. In the webinar, Berni shows one of our new key moments for onboarding Appcues users: "activated in the new app" fires when an account has done both of the core actionsthat mean a user is activated in our product, and only counts the first time it happens.
Before you jump into build mode, step back and define the moments you're trying to drive. What combination of behaviors means someone is truly onboarded? What does it mean for someone to have ‘adopted’ or ‘get value’? Define these outcomes first. That way, you have clarity and focus to build your understanding on.
With key moments taking center stage on data collection, it’s more than likely you’ll discover new events you’ll need to include that you’re not tracking yet. But here’s a pain: you set up a track event, and data collection starts from that moment forward. That data is gone FOREVER.
Until now. Enter enhanced event tracking.
The new Appcues now captures user behavior passively behind the scenes — even that behavior you just learned you needed for your key moments. When you're ready to use an event in your targeting, experiences, or reporting, you create the track event exactly the way you always have in Studio, and the history backfills automatically to this past July when we launched the capability, or to your Appcues install date, if you installed post-July.
Our goal here is to remove some pressure. You no longer have to sit down before every launch and play "guess every event I might ever need". The data is already there, so even if your strategy changes you’re never starting from scratch.
Data visualization is only as good as how your dashboard is built. And in Appcues, there are three ways to create and personalize your view.
Build manually. Add your metrics charts, funnels, retention and cohort analysis, line charts, bar charts, tables, breakdowns, targets, segment comparisons, date filtering, you name it. This full toolkit lives right beside your experiences. If you've been living the export-it-to-a-spreadsheet-and-pray workflow, this will save you countless headaches and manpower.
Prompt. You can now ask for a dashboard in plain language. Berni built our new product usage dashboard that our executive team uses through a back-and-forth conversation with Appcues AI. She started with a rough prompt, reviewed what it built, and refined from there. She also built a full weekly cohort retention dashboard starting from a single pre-canned "analyze retention" prompt on the home screen, then added comparison cards on the fly just by asking.
As the resident non-metrics person, I cannot overstate what a gift this is. I tell Appcues what I'm trying to measure, and it either builds the thing or asks me smart questions until we get there together.
Auto-generate with campaigns. When you organize your experiences into a campaign around an objective and a key moment, a dashboard comes with it — reach, uplift, conversion over time, objective completion by tactic. If you're an existing customer with experiences scattered across flows, banners, and pins, ask Appcues to gather the ones related to a launch or an onboarding motion, organize them into a campaign, and suggest an objective. The dashboard shows up as part of the deal, and you'll see the holistic impact of everything you've shipped toward one outcome.
Dashboards now come in personal and team flavors. Every dashboard starts as a personal view, so you can tinker in peace, and share it with the rest of the team when it's ready for more eyes.
Charts are great, but a picture only gets you to "huh, that's interesting." The analysis layer is what gets you to "here's what to do about it."
You can ask Appcues AI "how is this campaign performing, and where should I optimize?" and get back a genuine breakdown with a campaign-level summary, tactic-by-tactic detail, and prioritized recommendations. And it will call out when something goes wrong.
Berni noticed our stickiness metric had dropped on a dashboard and asked Appcues AI to help her understand why. Within a couple of minutes, it came back with an answer. A specific event had stopped firing around July 21st. She took that straight to our engineers, who confirmed something had in fact broken, and a fix was underway. A real bug was surfaced by one casual question that might have gone unnoticed for who knows how long.
I live in the new Appcues every single day, and analytics has changed how I work in ways I didn't expect:
This is the first release, and the team is already building on it: Sankey pathing (Berni got a preview and is mildly losing her mind about it), out-of-the-box evergreen dashboards for retention and user behavior, dashboard notifications, and account-level reporting so you can see activation at the account level instead of just the user level.
If you're already in the new Appcues: go poke at this today. Try one of the pill prompts on the home screen, or just tell Appcues what you're trying to measure and let it take it from there.
If you're not in yet, let's fix that. Reach out to your CXM or get in touch with us directly and we'll get you access. That way you can see what your data looks like in the new Appcues Analytics. Customers can also drop into our office hours — every Friday at 10am ET — with any questions, or keep an eye out for ProCues where you can register for the next Cued In on September 30th, where we're going deep on campaigns and tactics.
And if you build a dashboard you're proud of, send it to me. Seriously. Seeing what you all create and sharing it is my favorite part of this job.
For those who aren’t Appcues customers but still want to see what this looks like, check out the webinar or sit down with our team on a demo!
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