To view search data, you must enable your help center first. See Getting started with Guide.
Viewing search data
Search data includes end user and agent searches in your help center, as well as searches in the mobile SDK and Web Widget, if you have set up those channels.
Instant search and autocomplete searches are not counted.
To open the search analytics dashboard
- In Support, click the Reporting icon (
) in the sidebar, then click the Search tab. 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 your 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.
The CSV export option is available only to admins and account owners.
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. 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.
10 Comments
Hello - how are we able to get this data in Explore? And is it possible to break it down by user-segment?
Thanks!
Hey Sarah,
We do have some Guide data available in Explore which can be found here: Announcing the Zendesk Guide knowledge base reporting in Explore
You may also want to take a look at the Available datasets in this article as well.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hey, I have a very basic question relating to our help centre data.
I can see on search that in the last 90 days 26 tickets were created from the help centre.
How can I see which of our support teams those tickets were split across?
Hi James,
I'm afraid there is no option to drill into the results displayed on that dashboard to see the data on tickets created from Help Center searches. And, unfortunately in Explore, Help Center search data is not available, at least not yet at this time, so you creating custom reports for this is also not possible. Sorry about this limitation, James.
Thanks!
Hi @..., is there a way in Explore to pull out the search terms used by customers to see what they're searching? This feature used to be possible in Insights, but now that we've all migrated to Explore, there's no way to see if what our customers are searching for matches with the language we've used in our articles.
This is key for us, and I imagine *many other* companies who need to optimise their knowledge base for what users are looking for.
Hi Matthew –
There currently isn't a way to look at search analytics in Explore, but you should still have access to the built-in Search report, since it's not powered by Insights: Built-in reports
I did find this thread in our Feedback on Explore topic, that it could be worth adding your use case to: Get keyword data that user search in Help Center or Answerbot on Explore
Buenas tardes,
Necesito saber que opción del Explore me brinda los tickets creados por usuarios finales desde el centro de ayuda cuando hacen clic en Enviar una solicitud.
Espero que me puedan ayudar con un paso a paso, gracias.
Hola @..., para estos casos deberá seleccionar el filtro de "Canal del ticket" = "Web" en Explore.
Sin embargo, este valor 'web' incluye tanto tickets solicitados en el Centro de Ayuda (bajo URL .../requests/new), como por el Web Widget (ver artículo de Zendesk aquí).
Una forma de distinguirlos efectivamente es a través de la creación de un campo personalizado desplegable con las siguientes opciones (nombrado "Canal Exacto", por ejemplo):
Consecuentemente, estos valores los llenaremos a través de disparadores en la creación del ticket:
Parece un disparador innecesario, pero de este modo podemos utilizar el nuevo campo en Explore y que nos permitirá un desglose exacto del canal del ticket.
Hello Zendesk,
Our team recently integrated Zendesk with Algolia and we have noticed a huge drop in our number of searches. I see in this article that instant searches aren't counted. Does that mean the number of searches shown in my Zendesk Analytics is only showing searches where users hit the Search Results page?
The search results showing on your Zendesk Guide analytics only include those within the Zendesk Environment, which are Help Center, Mobile SDK, or Web Widget. Since you recently integrate your account to Algolia, there is a possibility that those events are not captured on the system. I highly suggest that you reach out to Algolia to verify how you can apply analytics to their Product.
Further, you can check search dataset to know more information regarding the same.
I hope that helps!
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