Announcing the Community dashboard and dataset for Zendesk in Explore

Announced on	Rollout starts	Rollout ends
May 16, 2022	May 16, 2022	May 25, 2022

Your new and enriched community reporting is here!

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Community dashboard and dataset in Explore. The new dashboard and dataset provide you insights about the engagement of your community forums (also known as Zendesk Gather). You can find the hot topics that are being discussed, and visibility into who are the most active members in your community.

Starting today, we’ll begin gradually releasing the pre-built Community dashboard and underlying dataset. You might not see the dashboard and dataset right away, but you can expect to see them no later than May 25.

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What is the Community dashboard and where can I find it?
• What is the Community dataset?
• Will community metrics in the new Explore reports match the community metrics from Zendesk legacy reporting or Google Analytics?
• How much historical data from my community will I be able to view?

What is the Community dashboard and where can I find it?

The Community dashboard is a prebuilt Explore dashboard that gives information about the community’s activity and general engagement of internal and external members. This includes tracking post creation trends over time and identifying hot topics by the number of posts, comments, views, votes, and subscriptions. The dashboard also provides insights about community activity, including a reply time overview to posts and a list of the most active members in the community.

Using the dashboard, you can slice and filter the metrics to get a detailed picture of your community’s activity, including:

• Which community posts engage the most customers: Measure engagement metrics by topics, brands, and channels.
• Who creates the most posts and comments: Find out whether internal or external users create most of the posts and comments.
• Who are the most active members: Identify and follow the members who post and comment the most in the community.
• How fast are the posts getting answered: Monitor the reply time to the posts by the entire community or by your staff.
• How post views affect ticket creation: Track the number of post views together with the number of created tickets and detect possible correlations.

You’ll find the new Community report tab together with the existing Guide reports as part of the prebuilt Zendesk Guide dashboard. For more information on using the dashboard, see Analyzing your Zendesk Guide community activity.

What is the Community dataset?

The Community dataset gives you the metrics and attributes you need to create custom queries about your users’ engagement in your community.

While the prebuilt 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:

• Monitor community activity, including post creation, comment creation, and other engagement metrics across topics.
• Compare post views across brands, channels and topics without having to use the data filter.
• Track average reply time to posts over time.
• Discover the new members of your community so you can treat them with a special welcome or other onboarding activities.

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

Will community metrics in the new Explore reports match community metrics from the Zendesk Support built-in report or Google Analytics?

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

Zendesk legacy reporting, external tools like Google Analytics, and Explore are different tools using different data aggregation mechanisms. We implemented the new recording logic to bring you more detailed insights into the metrics than what is available in the Zendesk Support built-in reports. As the community 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 analyze data across these reports.

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

What period of time is my community data available from?

All existing gather customers will be able to see the community statistics from February 9, 2022 onwards, through the Explore community reports.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to report on community data prior to February 9, 2022. This is because the new Community dataset provides more data metrics and attributes than the old dataset that was available in Zendesk Support built-in reports.

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