Properties Overview 

Properties help unlock the power of Appcues. They represent all of the data that Appcues collects and can use about your users and accounts (groups).

Not only do properties help you understand the makeup of a given user or account - properties can also be used for targeting content to just the right users at the right time (e.g. to show content only to trial users, or only to users whose renewal date is coming up soon), and for marking checklist items or Goals as completed (e.g. an item will be marked as completed on an Appcues checklist once a user's “Installed Chrome Extension” property is “True”).

The Properties page within Appcues settings will help you use and understand all of your user-level properties and account-level properties (also known as group properties). 

Within the Properties page, you'll see two tabs; one for user properties, and one for account properties.

User Properties

User properties are attributes you associate with individual users. 

Account Properties

Account properties, or group properties, are attributes you associated with your customer's accounts at the overall account level.

Properties tables

As you can see, both the User Properties tab and the Account Properties tab have the same table structure, with the same columns and the same management functions. Within the properties table, you'll be able to see the following:

• Display name: The name that will display in menus across Appcues. You can edit this name so that it's as simple as possible for you and your team to understand.
• Property name: The raw property value. This is the name that was set up by your engineering team during your Appcues installation. This cannot be edited.
• Data type: This specifies what type of data this particular property is. By default, we parse everything as a string. Admins can edit this to choose between: String, Number, Date, or Boolean data types. Changing the data type will help ensure data cleanliness across Appcues reporting, making sure that each property is showing up exactly how you're expecting it to across reports.
• Info: Click this info icon to quickly view this property's description, as well as some example values of what this property looks like. (For example, if the property is "Email," example values may be “Emily@appcues.com”, “John@appcues.com”.)
• Source: This indicates whether the property is a Custom property or an Auto property.
  • Custom Properties: Custom properties are traits and information about your users (or accounts/groups) that you can use for targeting Appcues content that you set up in your Appcues installation. For example, a user's email address could be a custom property. For more information about custom properties, check out the Targeting by User Property article.
  • Auto Properties: Auto properties are traits and information about your users (or accounts/groups), just like custom properties. Auto-properties are automatically collected by Appcues. As long as Appcues is installed, we will collect auto-properties for you! Learn more about what Auto-properties we offer and how to leverage them for targeting and segmentation opportunities in this article.
• Last seen: This is the last time that Appcues received data for a given property.
• Visibility: This toggle allows you to decide whether or not the property shows up elsewhere in Appcues (e.g. in targeting menus). If you choose to toggle off a property that is already being used (e.g. for targeting a flow to users), don't worry, the targeting will still work; it just won't show up in Appcues menus and reports from that point forward.

Editing a property

Each custom property has an edit icon at the far right side of the table. You'll notice that auto properties (properties created by Appcues) cannot be edited. 

When you click the edit icon for a custom user or account property, it will open a flyout where you have the option to make the following changes:

• Display Name: Update the display name for a given property to ensure that it's easy for your whole team to decipher its purpose across Appcues menus and reports.
• Description: Give the property a description to help you and your team by providing additional context for what the property means. The description will show up in targeting menus and other places where the property is used in Appcues.
• Data Type: Change the data type from a String to either a Boolean, Number, or Date to make sure we are able to properly format the property values across reports in Appcues.
  • Note: This is particularly useful for dates. Some customers choose to send in their dates in a UNIX timestamp format, which can sometimes be misconstrued for a string or a number. By explicitly configuring the data type for these properties as a “Date," you can ensure that this property will be appropriately formatted across Appcues reports as a date, leaving no room for confusion!
  • Another note: The cleaner your incoming data, the better this feature will work. Sometimes, we will be unable to parse a particular property value as the intended data type. For example, let's say you have a property called “Renewal Date,” and you've assigned this property the “Date” data type. 95% of your property values are coming in correctly as dates (e.g. 1/2/24, January 2, 2024, etc.), but somewhere along the way, for a particular account, this value is coming in as “a long time ago.” We will not be able to parse this in the date format, since this is really a string. In these cases, we'll show a warning icon next to the specific value that's having an issue. This way, you can do some digging to see why this property value isn't matching up, and correct it at the source.

Check out the related articles for more information about user and group properties in Appcues!