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6 pieces of practical advice from a FullStory Admin

The Fullstory Team
Posted June 23, 2022
6 pieces of practical advice from a FullStory Admin

The digital experience data gathered in FullStory is rich and varied—that’s what makes it so powerful. This also means that how organizations use FullStory can differ in countless small ways. Accordingly, there’s not always one best way of using FullStory. Different industries, different companies, different needs—each use case is unique. 

But filtering the signal from the noise, there are some overarching best practices that come in handy—especially for FullStory Admins who are managing complex accounts for their organization. 

Here are six bits of practical advice from Meghan, Senior Manager of Web Strategy, who serves as the FullStory Admin for a leading online automotive retailer. 

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1. Consider using an umbrella account structure

For organizations with hundreds or thousands of team members and multiple digital properties, keeping every FullStory account under one metaphorical roof can be sticky. 

For Meghan, the biggest problem she ran into before implementing the umbrella account model came down to session allotment. Whenever they implemented FullStory on a new page or digital property, Meghan had to make an educated guess about how many sessions that page would use. An incorrect guess would often lead to running out of sessions before the month was over, or pulling sessions away from another page or property where FullStory is active. 

Organizing all of their digital properties separately under an umbrella account enables Meghan to manage session counts more carefully and ensure that one page doesn’t unexpectedly consume another page’s allotted sessions. 

2. Create a Circle of Excellence

Improving your digital experience is a cross-functional effort, and there are many effective team structures that help to maximize DXI efforts. 

Meghan’s organization, for instance, has created a Circle of Excellence (also known as a Center of Excellence or CoE) to ensure they’re optimizing their FullStory usage. 

“With so many different teams using FullStory, the Circle of Excellence lets me have more ears to the ground of what problems teams are running into in FullStory, features they’d like to see, etcetera,” she said. “This model means there are more people around the organization to pick up on and share cues like that.”

3. Full capture benefits

Some organizations use sampling to analyze FullStory data, helping to spot and understand trends in a certain percentage of sessions that take place on their site or app (but still capture all interactions within those sessions). Meghan's organization used this strategy until recently switching to use all of the data they get from full capture—which logs 100% of the sessions that take place across their digital properties.

On a site that has millions of visitors every day, a sampled approach provides plenty of digital interaction data to make informed product decisions, but it can be tricky to know with absolute certainty how many visitors are experiencing an issue like a bug or error. 

“One of the benefits of logging all DX data rather than a percentage is that it’s easier to quantify the magnitude of a problem,” said Meghan, “which makes prioritizing or deprioritizing a situation easier because you can trust the denominator.” 

4. Take advantage of training resources

When Meghan invites a new user into FullStory, she ensures they understand the learning tools that are available to them (like the Knowledge Base and FullStory Learn) and encourages them to dig into these resources on their own time. 

However, she also takes advantage of the relationship her organization has with their dedicated FullStory Customer Success Manager, who has trained specific roles in her  organization, including designers and developers. 

“The customer support is one of the key reasons we like using FullStory,” she said. “I can rely on our CSM’s attention and expertise to further the product at our organization.” 


5. Set up usage criteria

Using any tool effectively at a large organization requires some nuts and bolts that are less than thrilling to talk about. Putting some governance in place for how your organization should use FullStory may not be the most thrilling task, but it can ensure that things run smoothly when there are hundreds of FullStory users at an organization. 

Meghan’s advice is to put together some documentation around procedural best practices—how sessions are allocated and managed, what naming conventions should be used within FullStory for things like Dashboards, how to request permissions, and so on. 

6. Invite your team to “FullStory and Chill”

Watching user sessions is one of the best ways to understand what site visitors are doing in the wild and generate ideas for improvements or new features. Many companies using FullStory do weekly or monthly watch parties—including Meghan’s organization.

“Teams will have ‘FullStory and Chill’ sessions where they’ll see how customers are using their page, feature, or tool, and find opportunities they might not have found otherwise. It’s a great method of customer discovery,” she said.

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