Reporting with tags

Tags are words, or combinations of words that you can use to add more context to tickets. You can assign them to tickets, users, and organizations. You create, assign, and manage tags in the Zendesk Support console. Tags are stored differently to other Zendesk objects and might require more consideration when you use them to generate reports. For example, while a ticket can only be in one group, or have one status at a time, a tag can be added to multiple tickets and a single ticket can contain multiple tags.

In this article, you'll learn how you can use tags in your Explore reports and see some examples. You'll also find out what tag information is collected by Explore, and where you can find it.

Tip: When you add or change tag information in your tickets, users, or organizations, it might take up to an hour for these changes to be synchronized with Explore.

For an in-depth look at tags, see About tags. For a useful example of how you can use Explore to report on macro usage by using tags, see Explore recipe: Reporting on macros using tags.

Tip: If the tag you intend to use is automatically generated by a field (like drop-down lists, multi-select lists, and checkboxes) consider using the custom field attribute instead. The custom fields values load faster and have easily identifiable values. For more details, see Reporting with custom fields.

This article contains the following topics:

• Examples for using tags in reports
• Useful tips for tag reporting
• Tag information collected by Explore

Examples for using tags in reports

Use these examples to help you learn about the basic operations you can perform with tags in your Explore reports. If you need more help creating queries and formulas, see Creating queries and Writing Explore formulas.

These examples are all based on the Ticket tags attribute, but you can apply the same principles to reporting with any other tag attribute.

This section contains the following examples:

• Show all ticket tags in use
• Show tickets with a specific tag
• Show the number of tickets without a specific tag
• Show tickets with multiple tags
• Show tickets with a string contained in their tags

Show all ticket tags in use

This is a simple report that shows all of the ticket tags you are using and the number of tickets that are associated with each tag.

To show all ticket tags in use

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the metric COUNT(Tickets).
3. In the Rows panel, add the attribute Ticket tags.

Your chart will look similar to the following example. You can click the Tickets column heading to sort the list by ascending or descending number of tags.

Show tickets with a specific tag

In these examples, you'll create a query that returns only the tickets with a tag you specify; in this case the tag csat. There are two ways to do this:

• Use a filter: Use this when you want to restrict the results from the entire query to the tag you specify.
• Create a standard calculated attribute: Use this when you want a single metric to be filtered based on the tag you specify.

To use a filter to show tickets with a specific tag

This example displays a count of solved and unsolved tickets sliced by ticket group. You can then use the Ticket tags filter to show only results with a specific tag.

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the metrics COUNT(Solved tickets) and COUNT(Unsolved tickets).
3. In the Rows panel, add the attribute Ticket group.
4. In the Filters panel, add the attribute Ticket tags. Then, click this attribute to open the filter menu.
5. Select the tags you want to show in the report, in this case csat.

Your chart will look similar to the following example.

To use a standard calculated metric to show tickets with a specific tag

This example displays the number of tickets with the tag csat and the total number of tickets, sliced by group.

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the calculations menu (), click Standard calculated metric.
3. On the Standard calculated metric page, give your metric a name like Tickets with csat.
4. In the formula field, enter the following formula:

   IF ([Ticket tags]="csat") THEN [Ticket ID] ENDIF

5. Check Compute separately. This ensures that your calculated metric is processed independently of other metrics to avoid conflicts.
6. Click Save. Now, you'll create a report using this metric.
7. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the metric COUNT(Tickets) and the metric you just created, Tickets with csat.
8. In the Columns panel, add the metric Tickets group.

Your chart will look similar to the following example.

Show the number of tickets without a specific tag

Because of the way tags are stored, you cannot use filters to exclude tags from a report. However, you can display the number of tickets without a tag by using a calculated metric and a result metric calculation.

In the previous example, you created a metric named Tickets with csat that returned all tickets with the csat tag. In this example, you'll create a result metric calculation that subtracts the number of tickets with the csat tag from the total number of tickets, giving you the number of tickets without the csat tag.

To show a count of tickets without a specific tag

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the Tickets and Tickets with csat metric.
3. In the result manipulation menu (), click Result metric calculation.
4. Click Add a new metric, type a name, for example, Tickets without csat.
5. In the formula field, enter the following formula:

   COUNT(Tickets)-D_COUNT(Tickets with csat)

6. Check the Clear used metrics box and click Add.
7. From the visualizations menu (), choose KPI.

Your chart will look similar to the following example.

Show tickets with multiple tags

In these examples, you’ll create a query that returns tickets with one or more tags you have selected. The tags are be related based on the OR condition. There are two ways to do this:

• Use a filter: Use this when you want to restrict the results from the entire query to the tags you specify.
• Create a standard calculated attribute: Use this when you want a single metric to be filtered based on the tags you specify.

Note: You cannot currently filter a query to return tickets that have two or more specific tags (an AND condition).

To use a filter to show tickets with multiple tags

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset using any metrics and attributes you choose.
2. In the Filters panel of Query Builder, add the Ticket tags attribute.
3. Click Ticket tags, then select multiple tags in the list.

Your query will look similar to the following:

If only one of the metrics placed in the query needs to be filtered by multiple tags, create a calculated metric and use it in your query.

To add the ticket tags filter to a metric

In this example, you want to return the number of tickets with the csat or closed tags and the total tickets created by month.

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the calculations menu (), click Standard calculated metric.
3. In the Standard calculated metric menu, enter a name for your custom metric like Tickets with csat or closed tag.
4. In the formula field, enter the following formula:

   IF ([Ticket tags]="csat" OR [Ticket tags]="closed") 
   THEN [Ticket ID]
   ENDIF 

5. Check the Compute separately box.
6. Click Save.
7. Open the data structure menu (), locate your metric in the Calculated metrics folder and set the metric's visible aggregators to COUNT and D_COUNT.
8. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the Tickets metric and the custom metric you just created.
9. In the Row panel, add the attribute to slice the query, in this example, it is Ticket created - Year and Ticket created - Month.
10. From the visualizations menu (), choose Table.

You'll end up with a table like this:

Show tickets with a string contained in their tags

This example returns tickets that contain the string you specify as part of any of it's associated tags. In this example, the query returns only tickets with a tag that contains the string "floor".

To show tickets with a specific string contained in their tags

1. Open a new query using the Tickets dataset.
2. In the calculations menu (), click Standard calculated metric.
3. On the Standard calculated metric page, give your metric a name like Tickets containing "floor" in tags.
4. In the formula field, enter the following formula:

   IF (CONTAINS([Ticket Tags],"floor"))THEN [Ticket ID] ENDIF

5. Check the Compute separately box.
6. Click Save.
7. In the Metrics panel of Query Builder, add the metric you just created.
8. In the Rows panel, add attributes that you want to look at, in this example, the Ticket ID.
9. You can filter out any zero or null values from the query. In the result manipulation menu (), click Metric filter and adjust the filter.

Your chart will look similar to the following example:

Useful tips for tag reporting

As mentioned previously, because tags are stored differently to other Zendesk objects, some reporting operations work differently when you use tags. These examples will help you understand some of the differences.

Count metrics used with tags

When a tag filter is used with count metrics, like Tickets, Unsolved ticket, Chats or Users, the COUNT and D_COUNT aggregators return different results. D_COUNT shows the distinct number of tickets, chats, and users. However, COUNT shows the number of tags. This explains why the COUNT aggregator returns a much higher number in the example below.

Time and activity metrics used with tags

Time-based and activity metrics like Full resolution time and Agent replies can use a number of metric aggregators like SUM, MED, AVG, MAX, and MIN. If you add the Ticket tags attribute to the Filters panel, your time-based metric must use the MIN or MAX aggregator. If you use a different aggregator, Explore will not return correct results.

Tag information collected by Explore

The tag information collected by Explore varies depending on the dataset you choose, but will include one or more of the following attributes:

Attribute name	More information
Ticket tags	Returns the tags associated with a ticket. Available in the Tickets, SLAs, Ticket Updates, Answer Bot, Knowledge Capture, and Calls datasets.
Assignee tags	Returns the tags associated with an assignee. Available in the Tickets, SLAs and Ticket Updates datasets.
Requester tags:	Returns the tags associated with the user who requested the ticket. Available in the Tickets, SLAs, and Ticket Updates datasets.
Submitter tags:	Returns the tags associated with the submitter of the ticket. Available in the Tickets, SLAs, and Ticket Updates datasets.
Ticket organization tags:	Returns the tags of the organization associated with the ticket. Available in the Tickets, SLAs, and Ticket Updates datasets.
Requester organization tags:	Returns the tags associated with the organization of the ticket requester. Available in the Tickets, SLAs, and Ticket Updates datasets.
Updater tags:	Returns the tags of the user who updated the ticket. Available in the Ticket Updates dataset only.
Updater organization tags:	Returns the organization tags of the person who made the ticket update. Available in the Ticket Updates dataset only.
Agent tags:	The tags associated with the agent for the Knowledge Capture event. Available in the Knowledge Capture dataset only.
Call agent tags:	The tags associated with the agent for a Talk call. Available in the Calls dataset only.
Leg agent tags:	Returns the Talk call leg agent's user profile tags. Each person that engages in a call have their own interactions with the system and are considered a different leg by the system. Available in the Calls dataset only.
Organization tags:	Returns the organization tags of the call end-user. Available in the Calls dataset only.

For a full list of metrics and attributes you can use in Explore, see Understanding Explore datasets.