Defining custom events and properties is an important step towards planning your installation of Appcues. This article will review a few specific examples on how you can create common sets of targeting rules.

Custom events are actions that your users are taking in your product. You will define what these key actions are and send these events to Appcues as a part of your installation. Custom properties are attributes that will help tell you something about who each of those users are and are also an integral part of your installation of Appcues. It’s important to understand how you’ll be able to use these events and properties based on what your goals with Appcues are. 

To learn more about the technical implementation of these events and properties, you can find more information in our Installation Overview (for Developers) documentation. 

If you'd like to learn more about events and properties, check out these docs:

• User Property Overview
• Targeting by User Property
• Events Overview

Targeting Examples

There are countless creative ways that you can target your users. Many will be very specific to your goals and the type of application you have. Here are a couple of common examples to get you started thinking about how to best leverage the data you are sending to Appcues.

Welcome / Onboarding Flows

A welcome flow or an onboarding flow needs to be shown to a new user. Another consideration is what type of user are they? Are they an admin that needs to set up the account and invite new users? Or are they an invited user that just needs to understand how to use your application? Here is an example of a segment that will target a Trial user with a newly created account, that is an admin.

Onboarding Nudge

When a user is being onboarded, you want to help guide that new user towards value as quickly as possible. Each user is going to be working at a different pace, but you are in control of these milestones. In this example, we are using the above segment in conjunction with an event to nudge a user to start collaborating with teammates. This defined audience will target new trial users who have had an account for more than 2 days, but have not yet invited a teammate.

Lifecycle Nudge

If you have existing features that you'd like to drive adoption for, a great place to start is to educate your users that have not yet adopted those features. Events are a great way to determine if a user has adopted the feature you'd like to nudge, and make sure that the user you are nudging will even find value from this feature based on where they are in their lifecycle. In this example, we will be nudging an existing user (that has been a customer for at least a month) to create an Appcues Segment. A Segment is most useful when you have multiple Appcues Flows published, so we will make sure to target those users specifically. And of course, we'll only target users who have not yet discovered the Segments feature. 

Encourage Repetitious Behavior

Sometimes, for a user to find value, they will need to build a habit as they are a beginner user of your application. In this example, Uploading a Document is something that should be done several times a week for the user to be able to really start adopting this file sharing tool. You can use an event to encourage a new user to continue to use certain parts of your product, if you find that they aren't using it to its full potential. This audience will be targeting new users who aren't using a part of this product as frequently as we would hope.