About Contextual Help for the Web Widget

Contextual Help is a Web Widget feature that uses the web page your visitor is currently on, along with your Help Center content, to suggest Help Center articles that may be relevant to their questions. Its goal is to reduce the effort of an end-user who might be trying to self-serve by suggesting contextually relevant articles.

The example below shows how the Web Widget uses Contextual Help to populate the widget with relevant articles as the user browses to a web page about the REST API:

This article includes the following topics:

• Enabling Contextual Help
• Understanding how Contextual Help works
• Customizing Contextual Help results

Enabling Contextual Help

Before you can enable Contextual Help, make sure you meet the following requirements:

• You have public Help Center content (not requiring log-in) or restricted Help Center content that you have configured to be accessed via the Web Widget.
• The Web Widget is installed on your website.
• You have enabled Help Center option in the Widget admin.

To enable Contextual Help

1. Open the Web Widget Admin page by clicking the Admin icon () in the sidebar and selecting Channels > Widget.
2. Click the Customization tab.
3. Make sure that Help Center is toggled on.
4. Click the toggle to enable Contextual Help.

Understanding how Contextual Help works

The Contextual Help feature determines which articles should be suggested by looking at URL of the web page the end-user is on It then uses the part of the URL after the hostname (that is, the part after .com, .org, etc.) to perform a search on your Help Center to find relevant articles, and displays the first three resuts as Top suggestions.

For instance:

• If an end-user is viewing the page myshop.com/apps, the suggested articles will include the first three results of a Help Center search on the term "apps".
• If an end-user is viewing a page deeper in your website, for instance myshop.com/account/billing, the suggested articles will include the first three results of a Help Center search on the term "account billing".

• If no articles match the search term, just the search box is displayed in the widget.

Note: Community posts are not included in the suggested articles list.

Customizing Contextual Help results

If your URL paths are not likely to produce useful suggestions, or if you just want more control over the results, you can override the search by utilizing one of our SetHelpSuggestions API methods.

For information on customizing your results, visit our Web Widget Developer Documentation.