Announcing the Zendesk Guide knowledge base reporting in Explore

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.