Triggers

Every guide has behavior rules that decide when it fires, who sees it, and how it acts when someone dismisses it. All of them live on the Behavior tab of a guide, under the heading "Behavior. How, when, and to whom this guide shows up."

The whole tab needs Save changes. Nothing on it saves on its own, so if you change a trigger and click away, the change is gone. This is the thing people get caught by, so check the button before you leave the tab.

The four triggers

Trigger answers the question the app asks above it: "When does the guide appear?" There are four options.

Auto · on page load

"Starts as soon as the pixel detects a matching user."

The guide fires the moment someone lands on a page where it's allowed to run and they match the audience. Pick this for your main onboarding guide, the one that should greet a new signup before they touch anything.

Example: a new user hits your empty dashboard for the first time. You want the tour to start on its own, because they don't yet know there's a tour.

After a delay

"Wait N seconds after page load."

Same as auto, with a pause first. Pick this when the page needs a moment to settle, or when interrupting someone the instant they arrive would land badly.

Example: your dashboard loads charts asynchronously. A three second delay lets the data paint before your face appears over it, so step one points at a chart that actually exists.

Manual only

"Only fires via Reveal Button or dynamic link."

The guide never starts by itself. It waits for someone to click a Reveal button you've embedded, or to follow a dynamic link from an email, a help menu, or a support reply. Pick this for anything a user should ask for rather than receive.

Example: a "Show me around" link in your empty state, or a link your support team pastes into a reply when someone asks how billing works. See delivery options for both.

On element click

"Bind to a CSS selector in the editor."

The guide starts when a user clicks a specific element in your product. Pick this when the moment of confusion is attached to one control.

Example: a user opens your report builder for the first time. Clicking New report starts a short guide on what each field does, and nobody who never opens the builder ever sees it.

Why the trigger matters more than the rest

The trigger is the most consequential setting on the tab, because it decides whether the guide gets a chance at all. Content quality only matters after someone has started.

That shows up plainly in your numbers. IMPRESSIONS counts the times a guide was eligible and shown. STARTS counts the times someone actually began it. A guide with a lot of impressions and very few starts has a trigger problem, not a content problem. It's appearing at a moment when people aren't ready to watch, or it's appearing to people the guide was never written for.

The fix is usually one of three moves: switch to After a delay so the page settles first, narrow the audience so fewer of the wrong people see it, or move to Manual only and let people ask. Rewriting step three does nothing for a trigger problem.

Tip. Change one behavior setting at a time and give it a few days of traffic. If you change the trigger and the audience together, you won't know which one moved the number.

Next steps

• Audience: Who is eligible to see the guide.

• Skips, frequency, and feedback: The settings that keep a guide from becoming a nag.

• Publish a guide: Behavior rules only apply once a guide is live.

• Analytics: Impressions, starts, and what the gap between them means.