Announced | Available |
January 18, 2021 | January 18 - March 11, 2021 |
We’re happy to announce that a new addition to your Explore reports is around the corner for everyone who has both Zendesk Guide and Explore. From today, we will gradually release the Zendesk Guide knowledge base pre-built dashboard and dataset.
In the sections of this article, you'll learn more about:
- What is the Guide knowledge base dashboard and dataset?
- Where do I find the pre-built knowledge base dashboard?
- Will page views in the new Explore reports match page views from the Zendesk Support built-in report or Google Analytics?
- What time period do I have page view data from?
What is the Guide knowledge base dashboard and dataset?
With the knowledge base dashboard you can now use Explore to discover how many page views the articles in your knowledge base are receiving. You can slice and filter the page view data to understand:
- What articles are being viewed? Discover page views by brand, section, article language, and author.
- Who is viewing the articles? Distinguish between page views from end users, staff members, or visitors who are not signed-in (anonymous users).
- How are the articles viewed? See if articles are viewed directly in the Help Center, through the Mobile SDK, or the Web Widget.
- How do page views change over time? You can monitor page views over time in Explore from the December 15, 2020, and onwards.
This gives you a tool to ensure that the most viewed articles are up to date, and review articles that are getting less exposure than expected. It also helps you decide if you want to optimize your content for the most popular channel, or if your audience is different than you first assumed.
An example of how the dashboard looks is shown in the figure below. For a detailed walkthrough, see Analyzing your knowledge base activity with Explore.
Build custom reports using the knowledge base dataset
While the pre-built knowledge base dashboard is a great starting point for most customers, it can be powerful to build your own Explore reports to monitor what is most essential for your business. For example, you could create your own Explore queries to:
- Compare page views across brands without having to use the data filter
- Look up the page view statistics of specific article titles directly in the report
- See a month-over-month overview of page views together with the tickets received in Zendesk Support in the same dashboard
To understand what the possibilities are, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide.
Where do I find the pre-built knowledge base dashboard?
To give you access to the new knowledge base dashboard as early as possible, it’ll start out as a separate dashboard in Explore, called Zendesk Guide: Knowledge Base.
Once fully rolled out to all customers, you’ll find the new Knowledge Base report together with the existing Guide reports as part of the pre-built Zendesk Guide dashboard.
Although this might cause some confusion, we hope you’ll appreciate having access to the dashboard as early as possible.
Will page views in the new Explore reports match page views from the Zendesk Support built-in report or Google Analytics?
If you’re already in the habit of monitoring page views using the Zendesk Support built-in report or Google Analytics, you might wonder how numbers will compare with the Explore knowledge base reports.
The Zendesk Support built-in reports, external tools like Google Analytics, and the new knowledge base reports in Explore are different tools. We implemented a new recording logic to bring you more detailed insights into the page view data than what is available in the Zendesk Support built-in reports. As the page view data is recorded in different ways across the tools, we cannot guarantee an exact match in absolute numbers.
So, we’d ask you to be careful when comparing data across the tools - as they are different - and not expect the page views to match exactly. We encourage you to look for overall trends over a longer period of time, when you analyze data across these reports, and get in touch with us if page views are drastically different.
What period of time is my page view data from?
All existing Guide customers will be able to see page view data from December 15, 2020 onwards, through the Explore knowledge base reports.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to attain historic page view data prior December 15, 2020. This is because the new Explore knowledge base dataset provides more data attributes than the old dataset that was available in Zendesk Support built-in reports. For more information about the available metrics and attributes, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide.
26 Comments
Great news! Any plans to bring KB search analytics form Support reporting tab to Expllorer?
i missed participating in the EAP, so i am so very excited this is happening! will it be available for the legacy guide plan?
Hi,
This is great news, we have been using it in EAP and it's good to see it being evolved. If we were to use API for the helpcentre would this still populate the report?
Hi Vyacheslav Skorbezh, this is definitely something that's on the roadmap but we don't yet have a specific timeframe. Keep an eye on our announcements section where we will provide updates as soon as we have them.
Hi Rachel M as the Guide Legacy plan includes new features, this should work just fine. Please let us know if there are any problems!
Hi Dawn Anderson, I'm not completely sure I understood your question but as long as there are articles live in your knowledge base, Explore should pick these up. If there are any problems, we'd love to help!
Rob Stack,
Glad to see this come through. How do we gain access to this. I noticed that there is a gradual release to this - but what timeframe are we looking at?
Thanks
Hi Bart, hope you are well!
The timeframe we are looking at is January 18 - March 11. I'm afraid I can't speak to exactly when you'll get this, but hopefully it's soon :-)
Hi,
"Guide knowledge" is Not yet visible in our Explore dashboard.
Is the Japanese version not yet supported?
We use Explore Professional.
Rob Stack,
Thanks for the update. Are there plans to include the community section of the help center by votes / comments etc.
Will there be options to report on which end user / email left comments / voted up or down etc to report on with custom fields in tickets?
For example, end user X voted on Y, left commend on Z and is from Country B, or filtered by custom field G.
Thanks
Hi Bart
There are definitely plans to include more information for Guide, including community content. I can't speak about specific features or timescales yet, but keep an eye on our announcements section and you'll be one of the first to know :-)
Hi 蘇 詩婷, the rollout will be happening until March 11th (we're doing it gradually). If you don't get it by then, please let us know and we'll investigate further. Thanks!
Hi Rob,
Is it possible here or elsewhere to see directly which article views/viewers continued on to create a ticket? And see that ticket?
Thanks,
Lisa
Hi Lisa S, I don't think that's currently possible. It's a great feature request though and we're always looking to improve our products, so please consider adding it to our feedback section where members of the engineering team and other customers will get more visibility into it.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001200913
Hi Rob Stack
I'm only seeing Answer Bot in Explore (the only query I can build from); when will Guide: Knowledge Base be available? Was that the question you answered above with reference to Guide: Knowledge? I'm trying to understand the timeframe so I can move away from Google Analytics and fully adopt this new tool.
to clarify further, with respect to this line:
To give you access to the new knowledge base dashboard as early as possible, it’ll start out as a separate dashboard in Explore, called Zendesk Guide: Knowledge Base.
I'm not seeing that, just Answer Bot. How can we request access to this sooner rather than later, or is that possible?
Thanks!
Hi Patrick Lyle
While I can't give you an exact timeframe, the new Guide knowledge base is currently rolling out. We should be completely rolled out by around March 11th. If you need to request a faster timeframe, please feel free to open a support ticket, or contact your account manager. Thanks!
I have the new Explore Knowledge Base dashboard and want to be able to view analytics for a particular article. How can I do that? I have over 1,000 articles and scrolling through the list is not a good option.
Update: Found a workaround, you can select all and paste into a spreadsheet and then search. But not the ideal workflow. How about CSV export as well?
When viewing topic section titles it would be nice to also see what category they are associated with in a separate column as we have sections with the same titles across multiple categories.

Hello Rob and community!
I just wanted to know what "Article votes" mean. In the metric it looks like an average (AVG) but an average of what? What do these votes represent compared to the views er article? I would like clarification.
I would like to know the usefulness of the articles, so for that I need the up votes and the down votes, and the metric needed would be "up votes divided by total votes". Can we get there yet?
+1 to Mauricio's comment; we use Up Votes / Down Votes as a % rating of that article for the period, so that'd be great to have as a metric or at least the parts to be able to build a custom one.
Hi Mauricio Giraudo and Harriet Klymchuk
This is how article votes are currently calculated:
"The average number of votes for your articles.
Votes currently reflect the sum of upvotes and downvotes. For example, if you had ten upvotes (which each add one vote to the total) and five downvotes (which each subtract one from the total), this metric would return "5"."
If you'd like this to work differently, it's definitely worth adding this to our feedback page. Thanks!
Thanks Rob Stack ! Very quick response.
Yes, I assumed it was that, but that isn't very useful since we don't know how many of those were upvotes or downvotes.
Maybe the metric returning 5 in your example means 5 upvotes which would be a very useful article, 100% of positive votes. In the case you showed, it was useful only to 67% of the voters (10 out of 15 since there are 5 downvotes). At the moment, we cannot know whether there were 15 total votes or 5 total votes so the metric does not provide any value on usefulness, its just a number.
In my case, adding a column with the TOTAL votes (regardless of upvotes of downvotes) next to to the NET VOTES (which is appearing at the moment) would be perfect and doesn't seem very difficult since the numbers are already somewhere and were used to calculate the net votes. I just need the total to give the net votes a meaning.
Is there any other way to get there at the moment?
Thanks again!
Thanks Mauricio Giraudo, I don't think you can get to the calculation you want at the moment, but it remains a very good suggestion for our feedback page. I certainly know there are more improvements planned for this dataset and your suggestion would be very helpful!
Hello,
There's definitely been some improvement on the Guide analytics, and that's very welcome, thanks!
Any plans to include filters on User segments? It is extremely important for us to be able to get statistics on these as we use User Segments to determine whether end-users are customers, partners or internal users.
Rob Stack, it looks like it's also not possible to filter the article votes based on the vote date—is that right? I'm trying things out and the only thing that's coming up is view date, but that doesn't impact the article votes metric.
Thanks!
Hi Kaela Glenn, that's right, you can't currently filter by vote date. I'd definitely encourage you to add this as a request to our feedback page though - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001200913
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