Explore recipe: Finding articles with no views

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
• Creating the report

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.

1. In Explore, click the reports () icon.
2. In the Reports library, click New report.
3. On the Select a dataset page, click Guide > Guide - Knowledge Base, then click Start report. The report builder opens.
4. To create a calculated metric for views:
   1. Go to the Calculations () menu and select Standard calculated metric.
   2. Name the metric Views computed separately.
   3. In the Formula field, enter the following:

      ATTRIBUTE_FIX(SUM(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.
   4. Select Compute separately.
   5. Click Save.
5. In the Metrics panel, click Add.
6. From the list, select Published articles and Views computed separately (the metric you created above), and then click Apply.
7. In the Rows panel, click Add.
8. From the list, select Article title and Article created - Date, and then click Apply.
9. To filter your results to only articles with zero views:
   1. Go to the Result manipulation () menu and select Metric filter.
   2. Under D_COUNT(Published articles), select Remove blank values. This removes the blank line at the top of the table.
   3. Under SUM(Views computed separately), move the slider to 0 (or whatever threshold you want to use in the report), and click Apply.
10. To add zeroes in the blank cells to make the table easier to read:
    1. Go to the Result manipulation () menu and select Result metric calculation.
    2. Click Add a new metric.
    3. Name the metric Views.
    4. In the Formula field, enter the following:

       SUM(Views computed separately)+0

    5. Click Add.
11. 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".
    
12. Give your report a unique name, and click Save.

Tip: You can also filter the report to show views only from certain types of users, like end users or agents. Add an attribute filter of Engagement user role - ungrouped and set it to the role(s) you want to see represented in your report. For a description of what the different roles mean, see Understanding Guide roles and privileges.