In this Explore recipe, you'll learn how to identify help center articles that have no views, or very few views. This shows you which articles aren't being seen by your customers.
Using this data, you can decide whether to add labels to the articles to help customers find them, or archive the articles if they're no longer needed.
This article contains the following topics:
What you’ll need
Skill level: Intermediate
Time required: 10 minutes
- Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
- Editor or Admin permissions (see Giving agents access to Explore)
- Article data in Zendesk Guide
Creating the report
For this recipe, you'll create a standard calculated metric for article views so that you can compute it separately from the list of published articles. This allows you to see articles with zero views, which would otherwise be filtered out of your results by default.
- In Explore, click the reports (
) icon.
- In the Reports library, click New report.
- On the Select a dataset page, click Guide > Guide - Knowledge Base, then click Start report. The report builder opens.
- To create a calculated metric for views:
- Go to the Calculations (
) menu and select Standard calculated metric.
- Name the metric Views computed separately.
- In the Formula field, enter the following:
ATTRIBUTE_FIX(SUM(Article views), [Article title])
Tip: If you're working in a language other than English, read this article to help you enter Explore formulas in your language. - Select Compute separately.
-
Click Save.
- Go to the Calculations (
- In the Metrics panel, click Add.
- From the list, select Published articles and Views computed separately (the metric you created above), and then click Apply.
- In the Rows panel, click Add.
- From the list, select Article title and Article created - Date, and then click Apply.
- To filter your results to only articles with zero views:
- Go to the Result manipulation (
) menu and select Metric filter.
- Under D_COUNT(Published articles), select Remove blank values. This removes the blank line at the top of the table.
- Under SUM(Views computed separately), move the slider to 0 (or whatever threshold you want to use in the report), and click Apply.
- Go to the Result manipulation (
- To add zeroes in the blank cells to make the table easier to read:
- Go to the Result manipulation (
) menu and select Result metric calculation.
- Click Add a new metric.
- Name the metric Views.
- In the Formula field, enter the following:
SUM(Views computed separately)+0
- Click Add.
- Go to the Result manipulation (
- To hide the Views computed separately column (since the new Views column takes its place), go to Chart configuration (
) menu, select Columns, and click the eye icon next to Column 4.
Tip: You can also click the eye icon next to Column 3 to hide the Published articles column, since that will always display "1". - Give your report a unique name, and click Save.
7 comments
Anjie Nambiar
Hi, this is great.
Is there a way to filter out agent views? and make sure that the stats report only signed-in users view (or other user segments we specify)
0
Erin O'Callaghan
Hi Anjie Nambiar, great question! You can add an attribute filter of Views user role - ungrouped and set it to whichever roles you want to see reflected in the report. The role options you can choose from are the Guide roles, which are described here.
I've also added this info as a tip at the end of the recipe!
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CJ Marcelo
Hello, this article is helpful.
Apologies for the ignorance though, when I try to follow these steps, I can't seem to find the "D_COUNT(Published articles)" Metric filter. All I can see is the one I created called "SUM(Views computed separately". Do I need to create that D_COUNT metric as well? What would be the exact formula do I need to use?
In addition, how can I add the attribute filter of "Views user role - ungrouped" under this Guide - Knowledge Base dataset. I can't seem to find it in this dataset.
Thanks.
0
Erin O'Callaghan
Hi CJ Marcelo, thanks for the feedback! Make sure you've added the Published articles metric to your report (in step 6). There's no need to create a new formula for that metric—it's already included in the dataset. After you do that, the metric filter for D_COUNT(Published articles) should automatically show up in the Metric filter panel (the screenshot in step 9).
And it looks like the name of the Views user role - Ungrouped attribute has now changed to Engagement user role - Ungrouped instead. I've updated the recipe to reflect that name change!
1
CJ Marcelo
Hello Erin O'Callaghan,
Thank you.
We can see the zero views result if we have the following metrics and rows:
However, when I add metrics such as SUM(Article upvotes) and SUM(Article downvotes) and set Metric filter to start at 0, the articles with zero views are not being shown in the results.
If I also add another Row called Engagement user role - ungrouped, the zero views are being omitted from the results.
Am I missing some steps or am I doing it incorrectly?
In addition, is there an attribute/metric to include these?:
- Article last updated date
- Last edited by
Thanks again.
0
Erin O'Callaghan
Hi again CJ Marcelo, and apologies for the delay in getting back to you. To answer your question about why adding the Article upvotes and Article downvotes metrics isn’t showing the right results is: I think the metric filter in your second screenshot just needs to be adjusted so that SUM(Views computed separately) is set to 0.
This second issue related to the Engagement user role - ungrouped attribute is happening because of the way Explore joins database tables together. (You can read a little bit more about what that means and how it works here.)
Essentially, there are two metrics in the report:
You can use any attributes from the Articles database table to slice the report because all of the rows of the report have a record in this table. However, once you use an attribute from the Article engagements table (in this case, Engagement user role - ungrouped), Explore filters the whole report by the records that are part of this second table. And because the unviewed reports are not technically part of this table (because unviewed reports actually have a NULL value), rows with no views are removed from the report.
Because of this limitation, I’ve removed the tip at the end of the recipe that mentioned the Engagement user role - ungrouped attribute.
And lastly, there is currently no way to report on the article’s last updated date or editor in the same dataset that this report uses. However, you can use the Team Publishing dataset to create a different report that includes this information—specifically, the Article event update time and Agent name attributes. (And to get the last update time, you’d probably want to use either the DATE_LAST or DATE_LAST_FIX functions. The Working with earliest and latest date functions article walks you through how to use those.)
I hope that helps!
0
Martin Sachs
I'm reading this last comment above and it explains why I'm stuck. Does this mean that we can only find articles with no views for all time vs recently? I know the engagement filters go back to 2020 but we are looking for low or no view articles only since 2022. Am I correct that we can't achieve this in Explore? I'm thinking getting views with filters and then a standalone report with all published article IDs allowing a Vlookup and assuming null views for the delta is the workaround. Does that sound logical?
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