Taking time to build out in app guides can be an excellent tool when getting users to adopt a feature in your product, but oftentimes we don’t take the time to measure the impact of those guides. Knowing if a guide is being interacted with and having the desired impact on your feature can ensure your team is investing resources in an impactful way.
Step 1: Create the inputs needed for this play:
| Name | Description |
| Guide Started | An event that captures the user starting an in-app guide |
| Guide Completed | An event that captures the user completing an in-app guide |
| Active Usage | A user action that you use to define an active user when counting daily/weekly/monthly active users (choose “Session” if you define an active user as any visitor) |
Step 2: Create your Dashboard in Heap
Click here to create this Dashboard in Heap.
Report Breakdown
Report 1: Guide Usage
What does it tell you?
This report will tell you not only the number of times your guide has been started over the past 30 days, but it will directly compare that to the unique number of users who successfully completed your guide.
How to interpret?
This report will let you know if users are interacting with your guide, and how many times the guide has been interacted with overall. Comparing this to the number of users who finish your guide can be very telling. Are the same few users using the guide repeatedly, or is there an even spread of starting a guide and finishing it?
It is best practice to look at this by segment to understand the impact of the guide on different groups of users.
Report 2: Guide Conversion Rate
What does it tell you?
This report will show you how many of your new users in the last 30 days completed your primary conversion event.
How to interpret?
Not only will this show you if the guide is being interacted with, but it will let you know if users are finding value in the guide by finishing it. Are you seeing a large drop-off in start to finish? That may indicate there is interest to learn more about the feature, but the guide needs to be improved. Are you not seeing many users interacting with the guide in general? That may indicate there is not much interest in that particular feature and can either be sunsetted or need to be revamped!
Report 3: Guide Impact on Retention
What does it tell you?
Understand if your guide is having any impact on users continuing to engage with the desired feature, and how often.
How to interpret?
This report shows if users continue returning to complete your active usage event after initial use, and is broken out by whether or not they completed your guide. This report highlights how frequently they return to complete your usage event. It is common to see a drop-off at the beginning of the line chart as users are getting acquainted with your tool or are experimenting. Retention of users is indicated by an upwards tick at the end of the line chart. If the line continues to go down, that lets us know that users are not finding value and are not returning to complete the desired event, and ultimately are not being retained.
Taking Action
If your guide was a success, great! If not, it might be worth taking a deeper look at the overall usage of the features you created guides for and considering if they need to be improved, or depreciated. Did targeted users engage with the guide? If not, it might be worth revisiting who you target or if the Key Event is even usable. Did users open the guide and not finish it? This can tell you the guide needs to be reworked so your targeted users find value in going through it. Then, keep measuring! This is an iterative process. Get the data, look for insights, take action, then go back to the data to measure the results of your work!
In Conclusion
In-app guides are a powerful way to drive adoption and sustained usage of your tool, so measuring your guide’s impact on these metrics should be a point of focus.