PostHog Handbook Library / Growth

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Error tracking cross sell

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At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

  1. Identifying Error Tracking cross sell opportunities
  2. Product specific pre reqs
  3. Motion
  4. Product usage signals
  5. Chat with users
  6. Website signals
  7. Discovery questions
  8. Demonstrate the value

Identifying Error Tracking cross-sell opportunities

Our first example here is for cross-selling Error tracking, which generally has the below requirements. Feel free to copy this as a format for other bundle motions where applicable.

Product specific pre-reqs

Motion

  1. Qualify if an account is suitable for this motion by understanding how they detect, prioritise, and fix errors today. If your stakeholder can't answer or isn't interested, find another stakeholder. If the answer is that don't have a tool to do this, don't link their errors to impact on key user actions within their app or that they prioritise based on error volume or another metric that is equally uncorrelated with impact on UX, this is a good opportunity for this motion.
  2. Suggest that they turn on exception capture for the relevant environment, with a billing limit or free trial set so there is no cost. In exchange offer to find the impactful errors they are missing and help them move towards a UX based methodology for error prioritisation by combining errors with PostHog product analytics data.
  3. Create dashboards of the new error data that correlates errors with drop-offs in conversion events (signups, checkouts, whatever is relevant here)
  4. Share your analysis as a Loom or other low time commitment format for review, emphasising the uplift in conversion events if these errors were prioritised. If required present these findings back to the stakeholders.
  5. If required help your stakeholder build a business case for the additional spend by linking the missed conversion events to value. For example, if the average LTV of a signed up user is 50$, multiply the dropoff in sign up events by 50 to get a rough ROI of finding and fixing these errors.
  6. Pitch this value as a reason to remove the billing limit and expand usage of error tracking.

Product usage signals

Customers don't always ask for Error Tracking directly, but their usage patterns can indicate a potential need. When you review customer accounts and chat with users, look for these signals:

Chat with users

Engage with users. Look for cues that signal gaps that Error Tracking can fill:

Website signals

Discovery questions

When reviewing accounts, ask:

Demonstrate the value

Once you've identified customers who'd benefit from Error Tracking, show them value in ways relevant to them.

Product Analytics

A few good starting points:

  1. Track error trends over time: Create a trends insight for $exception events and create alerts when errors hit specific thresholds. You can get both historical trends and real-time notifications on high-impact exceptions to prioritize engineering work.
  2. See if errors are affecting conversion: Combine errors with funnels to figure out if drop-off is happening because of errors – especially if errors are blocking users from getting through critical flows. You can tie this to customer lifetime value to show potential revenue loss. This is also useful for experiments - you want to make sure your variant didn't underperform because of a bug rather than the actual feature you're testing.
  3. Measure retention impact: Track whether users who hit errors come back less frequently.

For all of these, you can layer on data like $exception_types, $exception_values, or $exception_sources to figure out which errors are most common and how they're impacting users.

Session Replay

Session Replay and Error Tracking work wonderfully together – probably the strongest integration we have. You can watch recordings of what users are doing in your app and get clear signals of errors they're hitting. You can search for specific events, jump straight to a given issue, and see what happened before and after – all of which provide valuable context for debugging.

When viewing a session, use the "Only show matching events" toggle to filter by exception-related events. You can use $rageclick to identify UI frustration that correlate with errors – this helps highlight silent frustrations users are experiencing that otherwise aren't communicated. You can also create dynamic cohorts of impacted users and take actions on them.

Other use cases

PostHog vs other error tracking

Historically, error tracking is something only engineering teams use. With PostHog, there's deliberate value for other teams. For example, marketing can figure out why conversions dipped and look at Session Replays tied to errors. This is incredibly valuable to quickly identify blockers. Other error tracking tools might give you clarity on bugs and errors, but PostHog gives you the complete picture of the user journey.

Common blockers

“This increases costs that we didn’t budget for”

We should proactively give credits so customers can trial a new product. For example:

“My champion doesn’t make decisions on this product”

You should first try to build a relationship with the persona that will be users of the product. For error tracking, this will be engineers who work on areas where exceptions are critical (link to persona page).

Ask your champion how they are currently tackling the common use cases. Identify team members you want an introduction to and ask your champion for a warm connection. You can position it as a learning opportunity, asking for feedback, or a pitch (if you have a really strong understanding of the specific value-add). Help your champion with the internal pitch.

For error tracking, these questions are helpful to start the conversation:

If you’re not sure who the persona should be, ask the product team!

“I don’t have the resource or time to implement error tracking”

Position implementation as simple, especially if you’re asking your customer to try out a product for the first time. This is where you shine as a technical success person. Help your customer cut through the cognitive load of figuring out implementation.

Error tracking can be implemented with one click, or two lines of code(depending on the SDK). Hyperlink to the project settings to enable exception autocapture or share the snippet addition for the SDK they’re using. Follow up with a rough plan that is tied with their needs, such as:

  1. Enable exception autocapture – see events flow through
  2. Assess the errors, issue groupings – decide if you want to customise default properties so you’re getting higher quality signals
  3. Work with errors - update the status, view stacktraces, watch session replays and assign to teammates
  4. Set up alerts

You can also help create dashboards to help your customer understand the value of the product.

Action items

Technical recommendations

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/growth/cross-selling/error-tracking-cross-sell

GitHub source: contents/handbook/growth/cross-selling/error-tracking-cross-sell.md

Content hash: 5e85a168fb7eaa4e