Getting familiar with the core concepts of Appcues will help you go from idea to live, measurable in-product guidance quickly. Below are concise explanations of four Appcues concepts: Experiences, Targeting, Events and Properties, and Goals.

Experiences

Experiences are the web and mobile messages you create to onboard, educate, announce, and gather feedback. Each format serves a distinct job, from step-by-step walkthroughs to quick prompts and always-available help. Choose the format that drives a single, clear action. Keep copy short and specific, place CTAs where they’re immediately useful, and aim for one primary outcome per experience. We recommend that you start small, ship to a narrow audience, and iterate based on results to build a reusable library for onboarding, feature launches, and ongoing product education.

Flows 

Flows can be a single or a multi-step guidance created with Modals, Slideouts, Tooltips and Hotspots. Use Flows to welcome new users, guide them to complete key actions, discover new features and make announcements.

Launchpads 

Launchpads are a self-serve resource center that centralizes tutorials like Flows, FAQs, and key links so users can access guidance anytime. Use them to connect to your Knowledge Base and allow your users to search it without leaving your product.

Banners 

Banners are lightweight announcement bars that appear at the top or bottom of the product to communicate timely updates like launches, outages, or promotions without any interruptions.

Pins

Pins are small, persistent help icons you place on specific pages or elements to provide on-demand tips, links, or to launch deeper guidance when users want it, giving a low-friction way to support without interrupting their workflow.

NPS and Surveys

NPS delivers an in-product survey to capture customer sentiment on a recurring basis and can route responses to tools like Slack or your CRM, enabling follow-up actions by segmenting detractors, passives, and promoters. Surveys allow you to gather feedback on features, launches, etc.

Checklists 

Checklists break onboarding or adoption goals into bite-sized tasks that users can work through at their own pace, often linking steps to Flows or pages, while giving visibility into progress and blockers.

Workflows

Workflows are a feature that allow you to orchestrate different messages like email, push notification, flows and more from a single place. Workflows re-engage users across channels and direct them to the right tours or follow-ups, helping teams connect guidance, announcements, and feedback into a cohesive message.

Events and Properties

Events capture what actions users or accounts do, such as signed up, created project, or invited teammate. Properties describe users and accounts' traits, like role, plan, company size, or last active date. Together, events and properties let you trigger experiences at the right moment, personalize content, and segment audiences for precision and relevance.

Targeting

Targeting determines who sees an experience, where it appears, and when it triggers. You define an audience using properties and events, specify where it shows up with page or URL rules, and control timing and frequency using trigger and logic conditions. Effective targeting is about relevance. Use behavior and lifecycle signals to reach users at the right moment in their journey. 

Goals

Goals define what success looks like for an experience and make its impact measurable. A goal typically tracks a key event or property change, such as created project invited teammate, or upgraded plan, within a defined time window. Appcues attributes conversions to the experiences people saw, enabling you to assess conversion rate, time to convert, and lift versus a baseline.