Recently, I was catching up with some friends who work at a SaaS startup. We were watching their Fullstory sessions together and someone super new to Fullstory asked me, “Who is this for?”
I was super excited to say, “Everyone. Everyone on every team here can find something useful in Fullstory.”
I could say this with some confidence because I know that their business operates in several distinct teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering.
Because Fullstory captures everything, it can help provide answers for people in every department — from Marketing to Engineering — across their SaaS organization. The possibilities are endless!
As is often the case, when anything’s possible, it can be hard to know where to start. Cue Fullstory Segments to the rescue.
Wait. I can save my own Segments?
A Segment in Fullstory is a list of user sessions that match a set of criteria in Fullstory. A small set of Segments — including Signed up, New this week, Rage clicked recently, and Mobile — are available for everyone out of the box:
While these “came with the frame” Segments are useful in their own right (and can be further refined through Fullstory OmniSearch), the best Segments are the custom ones that you create to answer your own burning questions.
Creating a Segment in Fullstory is like getting an answer from a Magic 8-ball, except you don’t have to shake it and the answers are never hazy. Now that I think about it, maybe the only thing that Fullstory has in common with a Magic 8-Ball is that you can ask it anything.
Not sure what to ask? Here are some ideas to help get your gears turning.
6 Fullstory Segments for SaaS-y Teams.
1. Are people engaging with our new feature?
Helpful for: Product and Customer Success
Wouldn’t it be great to know if that new exciting feature you just launched was actually being used? What if you could find out feature adoption rates, find and diagnose sessions of users who are missing out on the new feature, and refine the experience around the new feature going forward?
You can easily build a search for users who clicked into [Your New Fancy Feature]. Here’s an example search and Segment from typing “Page Insights” (our targeted feature) into the OmniSearch bar:
Above is an example of the Search we ran in Fullstory to see sessions of users engaging with Fullstory Page Insights.
Rather than trying to reconstruct the precise Search, try simply typing the name of the feature into the OmniSearch bar. Alternatively, if you know the link or CSS selector for the element that users would have to click to engage with your new feature, search on that.
Once you’ve confirmed your search is pulling the correct Segment, “Save segment …”
Then, name your saved Segment with the pop-up prompt:
2. Which bugs are affecting the most users?
Helpful for: Customer Success and Engineering
Searching for Error clicks is likely to instantly produce actionable results, but how do you locate the most sessions with the most error clicks? Start with a search for “Error clicks” (just start typing that into the Fullstory OmniSearch bar) and it will auto-complete with 'Error clicked anything.' Enter.
Once the sessions populate, scroll down to the error clicks Searchie (Searchies are those search-sensitive charts and graphs) and click the text for whatever is at the top — that will get added to your search.
You can then watch a session and see the error if you like:
Yep there’s that Purchase error click!
Save Segment as: Known Bug — [On this element]
Bonus: Integrate with JIRA and send that straight to Engineering.
3. Who should we invite to our next out-of-town event?
Helpful for: Marketing and Customer Success
Imagine that you’re hosting an event in a specific city and you want to invite your customers or friends who work from that city.
Traditionally, you might look to your CRM and pull a list of contacts by company headquarters. Alas, as companies become more distributed and remote-friendly, these HQ addresses can be unreliable or difficult to keep up-to-date.
What if we could easily pull lists of users based on cities where they’re typically active?
You can do this in Fullstory by building a Segment of users with an arbitrary number of sessions in a given geography. For example, start searching for “sessions” to pull up the “Total sessions is …” prompt. Enter. Then, search for the geography you’re looking for. (In our example, you see Atlanta):
Your final search looks something like this:
Go ahead and “Save segment …” as: Users Working from <This City>
Export as .csv and load into your email sending provider to send them an event invite.
Pro-tip: When you send the email you can include a genuinely worded note, “We’re inviting you because we noted that you work out of this area often.”
4. Which users in trials are ready to talk about pricing?
Helpful for: Sales
What about your users who are trialing and might want to talk about pricing? Simply search for the URL of your pricing page (or some other identifying element for pricing) and Segment your customers by those interested in pricing:
You can refine that Segment further by only looking at users who spent a set period of time. Simply click the … and set Page Active Duration to whatever figure you like:
Go ahead and 'Save segment …' as: Users Interested in Pricing.
Bonus: Use custom vars to send assigned user as a variable to Fullstory; then you can limit your segment to only the people you’re working with directly.
5. Who is the Power User in my key account?
Helpful for: Sales and Customer Success
If you’re curious who the top users are from a given domain, you can simply search for @[The Domain] (Or use custom variables if you’re passing the account ID).
From there, look at the “Top users by total sessions” Searchie:
Save Segment as: Power Users — <my key account>
6. Why did this landing page perform better than the other one?
Helpful for: Marketing
If you are A/B testing marketing pages, this Segment could be particularly useful, and is super easy to set-up. Identify the URLs of your two landing pages and segment users further by the behavior you’re measuring (E.g. clicked “Add to cart”). Compare sessions from each landing page and see what’s working and what’s not.
You would run the above search twice. Once for each landing page.
Save two Segments: Landing Page A Landing Page B
Use the funnels Searchie for both segments to quickly suss out which out performed better.
Open Click Maps to see which parts of the page users interacted with the most.
Fullstory Page Insights > Click Maps.
Note: There’s no special instrumentation required here. Fullstory captures everything — including all the variables and versions of your multivariate tests.
Locating your favorite Segments.
Once you’ve saved your favorite Segments, you’ll see them in the “My Segments” section in the side navigation of Fullstory.
You can also easily search across all Segments saved by you or your teammates, so you can revisit your favorite Segments again and again.
Use Segments to focus your customer research to what’s most important to you — and share those Segments with everyone in your SaaS company, it’s easy to get on the same page.
Fullstory gives SaaS organizations unparalleled transparency around the customer experience. Everyone can understand how to move forward together.
If you have a “go to” Segment in Fullstory, please comment below or tell us about it. And if you’re not yet using the power of searching and segmenting your customers based on their behavior, what are you waiting for?
