Announcing the Search dashboard and dataset for Zendesk Guide in Explore

Announced on	Rollout starts	Rollout ends
November 5, 2021	November 8, 2021	November 19, 2021

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the help center search dashboard and dataset for Zendesk Guide in Explore. Together, this dashboard and dataset will help you learn what your customers are looking for in your knowledge base and give you the insights you need to improve search results.

Starting on November 8, we’ll begin gradually releasing the Search dashboard and dataset. You might not see the new additions right away, but you can expect to see them no later than November 19.

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What is the Guide search dashboard and where can I find it?
• What is the Search dataset?
• Will search metrics in the new Explore reports match search metrics from the Zendesk Support legacy report or Google Analytics?
• What period of time is my search data available from?

What is the Guide search dashboard and where can I find it?

The search dashboard is a pre-built Explore dashboard that includes data on how your customers interact with your help center, including what they’re searching for and how successfully they find answers. It helps you identify hot topics that interest customers most, and also helps you detect gaps in your knowledge base that need to be addressed.

Using the dashboard, you can slice and filter the search metrics to get a detailed picture of your help center’s performance, including:

• The most common queries your customers search for: Track search queries by brands, user roles, and locales.
• Where do users perform their searches: Track whether searches are performed directly in the help center, or via the Mobile SDK, Web Widget or from Agent workspace.
• Where you can improve your self-service performance: Track the number of results and click-through rate by searches to identify whether customers find what they’re looking for.
• How search volume relates to ticket creation: Track the number of searches and the number of created tickets, and detect possible correlations.

You’ll find the new Search dashboard as a new tab in the Zendesk Guide: Knowledge Base and Search dashboard. 

An example of how the dashboard looks is shown in the figure below. For more information on using the dashboard, see Analyzing your help center search results with Explore.

What is the Search dataset?

The Search dataset gives you the metrics and attributes you need to create custom queries to analyse your users’ search behaviour in your knowledge base.

While the pre-built search 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 searches across brands, channels and locales without having to use the data filter
• Monitor the click-through rate, and number of search results over time
• Build an overview of search efficiency across brands by using the Tickets / search ratio metric.

To see the complete list of metrics and attributes in the Search dataset, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide. 

Will search metrics in the new Explore reports match search metrics from the Zendesk Support legacy report or Google Analytics?

If you’re already in the habit of monitoring search metrics using the Zendesk Support legacy report or Google Analytics, you might wonder how the data will compare with the Explore search reports.

The Support legacy reports, external tools like Google Analytics, and Explore are different tools using different data aggregation mechanisms. We implemented a new recording logic to bring you more detailed insights into the search metrics than what is available in the legacy reports. As the search 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 results to match exactly. We encourage you to look for overall trends over a longer period of time, when you analyse data across these reports.

For more information regarding the differences, visit the article for Understanding discrepancies between Guide and Google Analytics data in Explore.

What period of time is my search data available from?

All existing Guide customers will be able to see the search statistics from October 15, 2021 onwards, through the Explore search reports. 

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to report on search data prior to October 15, 2021. This is because the new Explore search dataset provides more data attributes than the old dataset that was available in the Support legacy reports.

For more information about the available metrics and attributes, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide.