Viewing search data
To open the search analytics dashboard
- In Support, click the Reporting icon (
) in the sidebar, then click the Search tab.
Note: If you don't see results on the Search tab, refresh your browser. - To filter the data based on the channel where the search was initiated, click All channels, then select Help Center, Mobile SDK, or Web Widget.
- Click any of the four options for viewing search data:
- Total, all performed searches.
- With no result, searches that returned 0 results.
- With no clicks, searches where no result was selected.
- Tickets created, searches that led to a ticket being created.
- Hover your mouse over a node on the graph to see the total number for a specific day.
- Below the detailed graph you can view search data in a table.
The Total data set includes data for the top 500 searches overall. Each of the other data sets filters the top 500 search terms accordingly to show data for searches that had no results, no clicks, or resulted in tickets.
Field | Description |
---|---|
Search string | Exact term the end-user entered in the search |
Total searches | Total number of end-user searches for a term over the last 30 days |
Avg number of results | Average number of search results displayed for a search term |
Click-through rate | Percentage of end-users who clicked one of the search results displayed for a search term. |
Tickets created | Total number of tickets created by end-users clicking Submit a request in Help Center immediately after a search |
Top clicked result | Knowledge base content that was the most selected from search results |
If you want to export your results, you can click the CSV button on the upper-right corner of the graph. By default, the file displays the top 1000 search strings across all channels.
Following up on search data
Search analytics gives you insight into what your customers are looking for and where they are failing to find answers.
To make end-users more successful you can analyze search data (review searches with no clicks or no results, look at click-through, notice whether the best content appears in results, and so on), then take actions to improve search results and your knowledge base content.
After you make changes, it will take about three minutes before the content is indexed and can be searched.
Improve search results
- Add labels to content. (Guide Professional) You can add tags to content so that the appropriate content appears in search results. For example, if you see that end-users are searching for "e-mail" but you use "email" without a dash in your content, add a label with the similar term to the content.
- Update content titles. You can rewrite titles to more closely match end-user searches. For example, if your article is titled "Deleting an email account" and end-users are searching for "removing a user from email," consider updating the title.
- Break content into smaller articles. You can divide large articles into smaller articles to help customers find what they are looking for. For example, instead of "Managing email" consider smaller articles about "Setting up email," "Adding email accounts," and "Deleting email accounts."
- Update content body text. You can add common end-user search terms to the body of appropriate articles so that the article appears higher in search results.
- Remove old content. You can remove old content so that it does not clutter search results and confuse your customers.
Improve your knowledge base content
- Update existing content. You can update existing content to be more complete. For example, if end-users are searching for how to schedule a backup, and you have an article on running manual backups but not how to schedule backups, consider adding that information to the article. If scheduling backups is not an option, you might want to add that info to the article so that end-users don't continue looking for an answer.
- Add new content. You can add content for common searches that aren't yielding any search results. For example, if end-users are searching for "accessing email remotely" and no content exists on that article, consider adding that article to your knowledge base.
84 Comments
Hey Samuel,
This was built into the native dashboard and unfortunately is not an available endpoint within our API. I wish I was able to provide you with another alternative :-/
Hi Brett, are there any plans to fix this in 2019?
@Brett: I totally support the request from Pedro. This would be a pretty nice feature for analizing the tickets with more depth.
Hi Pedro and Alessio,
This feature is not currently on the roadmap. I would actually recommend creating a post within our Support Product Feedback Forum along with your use case since this will help gain visibility from both users as well as our Product Managers.
We greatly appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us. Thanks!
Thanks for confirming. For future reference, just leaving the same product request in Explore's Help Center, in case someone would like to vote:
@Brett: The wish was stated already 2 years ago by Karis Thoresen. I have not big hopes that something's gonna change..
@Pedro: done.
Hey Alessio -
Thanks for following up with Pedro's requests in the Explore Help Center. That's the right place to be making your voice heard about reporting issues.
I would like to be able to see the tickets that were created as a result of a search, whether it resulted in a click through or not. Can you make the tickets created a hyperlink through to the ticket itself?
This way, I can see more details on the user's question AND I can review the support agent's answer to help improve the content of my article.
Is there anyway to do this?
Hello Amy,
Just wanted to get some clarification on this from you. So are you trying to create a method of tracking where any ticket that is created from a using a specific hyperlink or when they hyperlink is utilized from a search for ticket creation?
@Devan: It's the same question which is going around for some years now, I had also asked on the last page I think: In the stats we can track the searches and even see how many tickets were created after a customer did not find what he was searching for. Unfortunately we have no access to those tickets. Having access could facilitate seeing what the issue is with the content in the help center.
@Devan: @Alessio has described the issue correctly. Since we get this information now as part of Content Cues, can it be added to the report?
Hello Amy & Alessio,
So I completely understand why having access to these tickets would be beneficial. While this is currently not a feature we offer in the base software, I would recommend leaving this request in our product feedback forums where are devs periodically seek out ways to improve our product.
Product Feedback Guide
@Devan: Pedro Rodrigues linked the entrys a few month ago, see his comment up here. I don't think it's useful to post it even more :)
Hello,
All Admins in our account don´t have the option to download the CSV of search terms, only account owner have access to download the CSV.
Is this the expected behavior?
Cheers!
Could you explain why a result of more than 100% would appear for the Click-through rate?
Thanks
API access to search report results, please - seems like a no brainer and and oddity not to be able to access via API ? Thanks!
Looking at our searches with no results it shows "extract" as one of them. I get 17 results from the same search. All of the article results are available to everyone. Why is the report showing me there were no results?
Thank you,
Dan
Like Sarah, I am also curious about a click-through rate over 100% - does this mean that a user clicked more than one result from the list and has more clicks than searches?
Are instant search/autocomplete searches counted in searches?
Sarah Anscombe Michael Ludden I'm sorry about the delay and hopefully you have already found your answer elsewhere.
If not, the reason is because “our native reporting on the views of your Help Center includes bots, crawlers, and repeat visitors.”
More information in this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/230199727--Why-am-I-seeing-differences-in-Google-Analytics-versus-Help-Center-reporting-overview-
Regarding instant search and autocomplete searches being counted in searches - the answer is no. We only count raw searches and hits in the statistics.
I hope that helps!
why is the csv result different from the view?
How are Views defined in this report? They don't seem to match Page Views or Unique Page Views in Google Analytics for the same timeframe. Thanks.
Hi Hannah,
Views (in the native reporting) show the total number of views for articles in the knowledge base during the reporting period. Page views in Google Analytics are individual page views.
The article Guide reporting tools for measuring self service talks about why we see differences in Google Analytics versus the Help Center reporting overview. It says: “The views of your Help Center, reported on the dashboard could more accurately be described as raw hits. Our native reporting on the views of your Help Center includes bots, crawlers, and repeat visitors. Google automatically ignores their own indexing bots in the results. Depending on how you have Google Analytics configured, bot traffic may account for a large part of the discrepancy.“
The other possible difference is if you are using a view in Google Analytics that filters out traffic from your IP address. The views report in Support does not filter out internal traffic.
I hope that helps, but do let us know what additional questions you have.
Please sign in to leave a comment.