Appcues shows you how your users behave and feel, and helps you change the outcomes that matter, such as more trial users activating or more accounts adopting a new feature. It brings your product data, analytics, and in-product experiences together in the Appcues App at app.appcues.com, with Appcues AI working alongside you at each step.

How Appcues works

Most teams use Appcues as a loop that keeps running:

1. Understand your users. Appcues collects what users do in your product and what they tell you. Dashboards turn that into funnels, retention, and the paths users take, so you can see where they stall.
2. Pick the outcome. Choose the milestone you want more users to reach, such as creating a first project. That becomes the objective of a campaign.
3. Act on it. Appcues AI plans and builds the experiences for each audience: onboarding for new users, reminders for users who stalled, announcements for accounts on a specific plan.
4. Measure and adjust. Each campaign's dashboard shows whether users who saw your experiences reached the objective more often than users who didn't. Recommendations point out what to fix or try next.

Your data powers everything

Your developer installs a JavaScript snippet (web) or a native SDK (mobile) in your product. From then on, Appcues receives three kinds of data:

• Properties describe who users are, such as role, plan, or createdAt, and which account they belong to. Your developer sends them with Appcues.identify() and Appcues.group(). See User properties overview and Group properties overview.
• Events record what users do, such as Created Project or Invited Teammate. Your developer sends them with Appcues.track(). Appcues also records page views on its own. See Events overview.
• Responses capture what users tell you through surveys and NPS.

You can also bring in data from tools you already use, such as Segment, Amplitude, or your CRM, in Settings > Connections.

Appcues uses this data to target experiences, personalize their content, build your dashboards, and generate recommendations. Review what it receives in Settings > Events, Properties, and Accounts & Users.

The installation snippet and your account ID are in Settings > Web, or Settings > Mobile for mobile apps. When you sign in for the first time, the Appcues App walks you through setup. See Set up Appcues.

Campaigns organize your work around an objective

Every campaign starts from an objective, the measurable result you want, such as "60% of trial users create a project in their first week." A campaign contains tactics, and each tactic contains one or more experiences that work toward the objective.

A "Trial activation" campaign might have one tactic for onboarding, another for reminders, and a third for follow-up. A tactic can also have its own objective, so you can see how much each approach contributes.

Objectives are measured with Key Moments, the milestones in your product that mark progress, built from events and user conditions. Define a Key Moment once in Settings > Key Moments and reuse it across objectives, targeting, and dashboards.

You can attach a brief to a campaign or a tactic to describe the audience, the problem, and the context. Appcues AI reads briefs when it plans and builds.

See Campaigns overview and Write briefs and set objectives.

Appcues works from your data

Describe what you want in plain language, and Appcues AI builds it or opens the builder for you to finish. For example: "Build a campaign that increases adoption of our new reporting feature among trial users." You can also hand it a mockup, a page URL, or an existing Flow to build from.

Appcues AI reads your briefs, your Key Moments, and the data Appcues collects, so its suggestions fit your product and your users. It can create campaigns, build experiences and dashboards, and answer questions about your users and results. Start a conversation from Home, or open the chat panel from any page. Past conversations are listed in the sidebar. Type @ to reference a campaign, experience, segment, or Key Moment.

An admin controls Appcues AI in Settings > Appcues AI. See Write prompts for Appcues AI and Configure Appcues AI.

Experiences reach users where they work

Experiences are the content your users see in your product:

Flows and Embeds can include survey questions and branch to different steps based on the answer.

Targeting is set on each experience, in its Settings tab:

• Audience controls who sees it: all users, users in a segment, or users who match rules you add, such as role, plan, or past behavior.
• Pages and Environment control where it appears: which paths, and which of your domains.
• Trigger and Frequency control when it shows: when a user reaches the page or an event occurs, and whether it shows once, every time, or several times.
• Weight decides which experience shows first when more than one qualifies.

See Find and manage experiences in the Appcues App and Create an experience with Appcues AI.

Dashboards show whether it's working

Each campaign and tactic has a dashboard that tracks its objective. It shows how many users saw your experiences, how many of them reached the objective, and how they compare with users who didn't see anything.

You can also build your own dashboards from metrics, funnels, retention, and user journey cards, or ask Appcues AI to build one. Filter any dashboard by date range, segment, or platform.

See Campaign and tactic dashboards and Analytics dashboards overview.

Recommendations tell you what to do next

Appcues AI reviews your campaigns and live experiences regularly and adds what it finds to the Recommendations page. Each recommendation is an issue to fix, such as an experience that's failing to show, or an opportunity to act on. Some include an action Appcues AI can carry out once you approve it. An admin can turn recommendations off in Settings > Appcues AI.

See Review and act on recommendations.

More ways to measure and reach users

These tools are also available, and they're moving into the Appcues App over time:

• Goals track whether users who saw a specific experience went on to complete an action.
• A/B tests compare two versions of an experience to see which performs better.
• Control experiments hold an experience back from a random group, so you can measure the difference it made.
• Workflows combine in-product experiences with email and push notifications into sequences triggered by what users do.

Find your way around

The left sidebar has six sections:

To open Settings, click your account at the bottom of the sidebar. It's where you invite teammates (Team), install Appcues (Web, Mobile), connect other tools (Connections, Webhooks, API keys), and manage your data (Events, Properties, Key Moments, Page Groups, Accounts & Users).

Next steps

1. Set up Appcues: plan your installation, install the snippet or SDK, and define your Key Moments.
2. Set up Appcues AI and your theme: give Appcues AI your product context and build a theme from your brand.
3. Launch your first campaign: learn about your users, pick an outcome, and launch a campaign that moves it.

Common questions

Will Appcues slow down my app?

The SDK loads asynchronously from Fastly's CDN and doesn't block your page from rendering. See FAQ for developers.

Does Appcues need personal information?

No. Appcues needs a unique, stable user ID, which can be a database ID or UUID. If you send personal information such as names or emails, check with your security team first. See FAQ for developers.

How long does installation take?

Plan for more than adding the snippet. Before your developer starts, decide which user IDs, properties, accounts, and events your first campaigns need, because a user ID or property name is hard to change once data is flowing. A complete installation is what makes targeting, Key Moments, dashboards, and recommendations accurate. See Install Appcues without rework.

Can I use Appcues from my own AI tools?

Yes. The Appcues MCP server lets you build and review experiences from Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. Experiences you create there start as unpublished drafts.

Which tools does Appcues connect to?

Appcues connects to analytics tools such as Segment, Amplitude, Heap, and Mixpanel, plus CRMs, marketing platforms, and data warehouses. You can also send data through webhooks or the Public API. Connect tools in Settings > Connections. See the integrations overview.