Send search data from Web Widget to Google Analytics
Feature Suggestion
Provide a way to push data from the web widget to Google Analytics, so that we're able to get the same data we get if somebody searches directly in the Help Center. This would provide a more complete version of what people search for, along with all other collected data.
Business Impact / What it would help with
- Allows us to make far better decisions on content curation and creation strategy.
- Helps us demonstrate the positive impact of web widget to the business and provides context for ticket deflection.
- Allows us to better share reliable and accurate data across our organization.
- Ultimately allows us to deliver a far superior search and content experience than we can without it.
Background Context
Logging this idea per the suggestion in comments on this question post.
We promote use of the widget to our customers because we believe that surfacing help in-platform is one of the most effective service experiences a technology customer can have.
We use Google Analytics to analyse user behaviour and search in the Help Center because:
- We can filter out traffic from specific IPs (our own searches often cloud what customers really want)
- We can use the data to understand who is searching for what (which is hugely impactful in a complex and multi-faceted userbase)
- We can see not only when people get no results for a phrase, but also what they re-search for, how many times it happens and what the journey flow is, across multiple filters, dimensions and segments.
- We can fast create deep insight dashboards through tools like DataStudio to explore and display everything from high level metrics to individual content performance metrics.
All of the above gives us a significantly more insightful experience and allows us to tie data in with our marketing team efforts on public pages. This allows us to create a really great content/service experience for both our customers and prospects.
Without the data from Web Widget being available in Google Analytics, however, the value is almost entirely lost, because we're only dealing with a partial (~40% on a good day) dataset.
This means our decisions only relate to those people using the Help Center natively which is a small subset of our overall userbase. In other words, it slows us down and means we're restricted from making any major decisions.
This would be a game changer in how we understand our customers.
Our backup plan
As in-platform search is such a significant part of how we want people to find information, if this doesn't end up being a possibility, we'd probably drop the use of the web widget entirely and build our own solution on top of the Zendesk API.
This is not the ideal solution for us, because we'll need to spend time on the development resource to build then subsequently maintain it and recreate the value it DOES bring.
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Hi Zendesk,
Is there any progress on this? We're in a similar boat as Dan. Almost all of our help center traffic comes from the widget on our site and I'd love to be able to find out what people are searching for in the Widget so I can build a better help center.
Thanks!
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Hi Chris, I don't have an ETA yet but this is among the top things we're looking to do next. In the meantime, some of these analytics are surfaced in Zendesk Support Reporting. You can filter by Web Widget in the Knowledge Base and search section. Here are some articles that may help:
Analyzing Help Center search results (Guide Professional)
Analyzing Help Center knowledge base and community activity (Guide Professional)
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Hi Everyone, especially @Daniel and @Erica...
What's going on with this feature?We're also waiting for it and really want to see data from the web widget in our Google Analytics ASAP - Zendesk analytics allow us to see the searches made but we need to track who is making the searches via the web widget.
Please update us - the initial discussion here was started a year ago...
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+1 to this. It would be very helpful!
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+1'ing this as well! If there are any updates, it'd be great to hear them.
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Hey folks, just wanted to raise awareness that we have implemented Google Analytics events for Chat in the Web Widget. We're also defining more events that cover Help Center and other channels, so hoping to provide an update soon with an ETA.
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Hi Daniel this is a MAJOR gap for the analysts amongst us, i confess i had assumed that Zendesk would have had this sorted by now. Not being able to link search events to a clientid in a 3rd party analytics product especially google is a big problem. Wish i had realised before my latest client ran their procurement process as to be honest i would have ruled this product out - meanwhile i'll go back to other solutions & watch with baited breath for any updates.
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Hi everyone, I have given my vote for this feature.
We have recently implemented the Web Widget but without helpful data and analytics we have problem showing a proper business case and to do a knowledge gap analysis based on search words.
Thanks
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Thanks for the great feedback, Dan. This is a helpful way to communicate what you're looking for - I've made sure that the Product Manager for the web widget is aware of this post.
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This is great feedback, Dan. We are in the exploration stages and this is really useful for us. I don't have an ETA but it's something we're thinking about. We'll update this post when we have more to report.
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Thanks Erica and Nicole. Looking forward to any updates that may come.
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Completely agree here with Dan - we're tracking data from the web browser views via Google Analytics already, but we're unable to do so with the mobile sdk and web widget views. Having this being hooked up to GA as well would make it easier to spend less time gathering data from multiple sources, and not to mention, benefit from GA's isolation of internal agent usage/removing our office's ip address from the data.
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That's good for biz analysis. Hope can see it soon.
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+1 to this.
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+1.
Our users search terms are very valuable to help us know how to improve our knowledge base and forecast product evolution. This issue is coupled with the fact that the web widget does not offer an easy direct link to the help desk meaning the majority of searches are performed directly in the web widget.
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+1 to this. really should get this feature going
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+1
Driving our customers to self help during our peak season on common questions is a goal of ours. We work in an industry with a lot of jargon (healthcare) so our customers can speak differently than we do. Seeing what terms users search for will help us refine our articles to get the right content to them. -
Hi All,
I'm Miranda, the Web Widget Product Manager. I wanted to provide an update on the ability to send Help Center search terms from within the Web Widget into Google Analytics (and other third-party Analytics tools) as I know it's something that's been of interest. We recently introduced enhanced event tracking within the Web Widget. You can read more about it in the announcement here.
You'll be pleased to know that the new Help Center search event that we introduced will now pass in an end user's search term within the label parameter. This will allow you to see what search terms end users are typing into the Web Widget.
Hope this helps! If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to let me know.
- Miranda.
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