Question
Can I report on Help Center usage? For example, can I report on articles created versus published dates, or article views?
Answer
If you have the Knowledge Capture app, you can use the Knowledge Capture tab in Explore to report on articles created through the app. You can also use this dashboard to understand which articles are shared in tickets by your agents. For more information, see the article: Analyzing your Knowledge Capture activity (Guide Professional and Enterprise).
If you have Team Publishing, you can use the Team Publishing tab in Explore and create reports to monitor when an article was created and when it was published. For more information, see the article: Analyzing Guide Team Publishing activity (Guide Enterprise).
Finally, you can also report on article views and votes if you use the Knowledge Base tab. For more information, see the article: Analyzing your knowledge base activity with Explore.
26 Comments
I wish that the help center reporting tab that shows the most read articles didn't include views from logged in editors of the articles. Whenever I've written an article that needs lots of editing it rushes to the top of the "by views" listing, even before the article is made public. This makes the data less useful for our small company that doesn't get all that many page views in the help center per day.
I experience the same thing as Pelle... It completely corrupts the data provided if it accounts for the editor's visits.
Is there any way this can be avoided?
Hey guys!
I'm by no means a Google Analytics expert, but I know we have our Google Analytics set up to filter out internal traffic. I did some poking around and it looks like we do this by IP address. How are you guys trying to filter internal traffic?
Will this be available in the new Explore reporting?
From Support I can open a User and view their Comments, Posts and Subscriptions. I cannot understand why this information is not available in a reporting suite.
Hey Jeff!
This is a good question, but I don't know the answer. I'm going to check with some folks and see what I can find out!
Hi Jessie! Did you get an answer to Jeff's question above? As we can see who voted 'no' for 'was this article helpful?' in support, it would be great if we could compile this information somewhere. Thanks!
Hey Mike -
Users do not have to be logged in to the Help Center in order to click the "was this article helpful" button, so there's no way to track who those users are.
Nicole,
You do capture this information for signed in users and we have SSO implemented so all of our users are signed in. It would be nice if I could easily locate the users who down voted a help article to ask them for feedback. Please let me know if this is possible. Thanks!
Hey Mike -
Sorry it took me a while to figure this one out for you. But I have good news - there are API endpoints for votes, and you should be able to pull the data by user. These endpoints exist for both the "was this article helpful" votes as well as the votes on community posts.
First, what you'll want to do is get a browser extension for JSON viewing - there are several good ones out there. If you use Chrome, folks around here like this one.
Then, in your browser URL bar type in: https://SUBDOMAIN.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/EN-US/articles/ARTICLE_ID/votes.json?include=users` replacing subdomain, en-us (if needed), and article_id
For further reference, here is the list of API Endpoints.
Let me know if this works for you or if you have additional questions.
Is there any way to even see an expanded view of the Overview Help Center reports? I'd like to see more than just the top 5 searches. Especially, searches without answers or that create tickets would help me know what to add to the Help Center. Is there anything in the works to make this report a bit more robust? Thanks!
Hey Chris!
I'm afraid it's not possible to expand the Overview data for Help Center. You should be able to get that information using Google Analytics, though!
I have setup a schedule in Insights to send out the dashboard we have created to our managers and directors on a weekly basis. This is in a PDF format. It would be great if we could include the Knowledge base statistics on this too. Currently I have to send these separately and manually.
We already have stats on the Overview page. Why can't these be added to Insights? Is there anything on the road-map to have this implemented as part of Insights?
Thanks for the post and feedback Darren!
At this time the data that is pushed into the Insights reporting platform uses certain API endpoints that are tied to the ticket data specifically. There are certain Help Center search endpoints that we've built into the custom dashboards you referenced in your screenshots, but that isn't pulled over into Insights where you can get an export of the material.
In the future we hope to have any sort of data exportable, but unfortunately we don't have timelines on when exactly that will happen. If you're looking for more statistics accessible for your Help Center reporting, I would recommend checking our the Google Analytics plugin we have available to use with the Guide page.
Can we have an update on the plans to include more reporting on Guide in Insights? I can appreciate that implementing massive features like this takes time, but so much of Zendesk is pushing for knowledge centred support.
As a team who is dependent on Guide, it's frustrating not being able to report on our teams performance. I wish I could see how the massive changes we've made to our help center have helped - or hindered - our users.
Hi Cyrup -
There aren't any updates we can share at this point in time. Typically, updates are shared via the Announcements section and on related posts in the product feedback topics in the community. Here are some about reporting on Guide that you may want to follow for future updates:
Help Center Reporting available in Good Data/Insights
Ability to Report on Help Center Content
Hi there
Just looking at the search reporting, I see 90 total searches, but below the graph only see one search string. What am I doing wrong?
Hello Fiona,
I am sorry to hear this trouble on your end. Let me see what I can do to sort this out. Could you please share a screenshot of how you filtered this data? So I can try to replicate the issue?
Looking forward to hearing from you again!
Best Regards,
Hi there!
I think there was a weird delay on the data - it seems to be better now. Thanks!
Hello Fiona!
Most welcome! I’ll go ahead and mark this as solved.
Have a nice day!
Hi again!
Another question that I couldn't really find the answer to - agents use our Help Center to check their answers and provide links for customers through Chat etc. How can filter out their searches/article views from the Reporting tab in Zendesk Support? Sorry if the answer can already be found somewhere - I had a look but I couldn't find anything.
Thanks!
Hey Fiona,
The native reporting for search activity will include the agent's search results as well as end-users. If you'd like to have more control over what data is being pulled from your Help Center, you'll want to enable Google Analytics as mentioned in the article I've attached.
I hope this helps!
Thank you! I feel like it would be good to be able to separate that out natively, but I will check with the dev team if this is something we can do. Thanks!
why can't you report on knowledge base performance in insights/explore? Is this on your roadmap. Considering Zendesk is all for pushing for self-service customer interactions i'm a little confused why this isn't important to you. Using Google Analytics is a pain and means our customer service directors and managers are now having to be given access to Google Analytics and trained up on how to drill into the details.
Hey Mark,
Help Center reporting is something that is definitely on our roadmap in the Explore product. We currently have Guide Knowledge Base reporting in EAP, however, this is currently closed as our Product Managers are working through the feedback given to them. More information on our Announcement page here: Announcing the Guide Knowledge Base reporting in Explore EAP
Brett Bowser You answered Fiona
This article state
Please clarify
Greetings Kalle,
Thanks for calling that out: Brett's comment is correct - agent searches are included in that native reporting dashboard. I will flag the article you mentioned to see that it is corrected.
Dwight B. | Customer Advocate
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