Tony Roma

Thanks to the team for wrestling with this. Deciding how to handle breadcrumbs with something like this is a tough challenge. It never worked very well when we were using WordPress.

@Michael: Do you have breadcrumbs above the article content? I'm wondering what that would look like with an article posted in multiple sections.

@Steve

Thanks for mentioning Madcap Flare. I'm looking into it now as a possible content authoring and management tool. Zendesk is a ticketing system that has tacked on other functions and features, so I don't expect Help Center to get the necessary changes to be on par with a full-fledged authoring tool any time soon.

You're comments are right on: It's best to find the most efficient method of dealing with a problem, and throwing more workers at it is rarely the best solution. And it tends to be the most costly.

I think the answer to many of the stated use cases will be through integrations. I've seen many comments from Zendesk staff stating that they're using Oxygen Author/DITA to author and format content. It says a lot when a company can't use their own content management tool to manage their content.

@Christian

I appreciate your thick skin. :) Anyone who's been in your position knows very well that it's impossible to make every change that customers want, achieve every business goal that management throws at you, and while trying to understand the impact of design changes. A glance at any large SaaS product's forums will turn up all the same arguments and complaints.

By the way, we once used WordPress for our help site, and having articles assigned to multiple categories did indeed muck up our SEO and analytics. From a user perspective, though, it was easier to navigate and understand than Help Center.

The recent content overview and editing page changes seem cosmetic at best, but it sounds like there is much more happening "under the hood." I hope that we see additional benefits of those improvements in the near future.

Hi Sandra,

Just getting back to metrics after focusing on my main responsibility as Insightly's product writer for a bit. (The Many Hats situation of life at a start-up!) Our custom dimension is available in the Site Content reports and others. And our pageview counts have normalized, so this worked for us.

I hope you worked it out.

Hi Sandra,

I guess we're on the right track. :) Ours is a User-level metric, so I believe it will be applicable across reports through segmentation. Once we've updated our code and answer a couple more questions, I'll update this comment to let you know what happens for us.

Thanks for sharing your experience, too!

Hi Sandra,

I've run into the same problem. I took a class from a very helpful Google Analytics consultancy called LunaMetrics which helped me catch this. They've also proposed a solution:

If the custom dimension is set at the Session or User level, then you can use an Event instead of a pageview. What the event Category/Action/Label say isn't really important, as we're just using it as a vehicle to get the data into Google Analytics. The important part is the "non-interaction parameter" - which tells Google not to count this as an interaction, which means it won't influence Bounce Rate or Time on Site.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events

ga('set', 'dimension1', tag);
ga('send', 'event', 'ZenDesk', 'UserType', tag, {
nonInteraction: true,
});

I'll update my suggestion above to include this parameter.

Updated to reflect a better workflow and avoid using ga('send', 'pageview');

We're trying to segment actions based on user tags for paid customers, staff, other (logged in, other tags), and anonymous (not logged in).

GA dimension is set to a User-level scope. We'll also pass this through with a non-interaction event, so we don't double our pageviews.

  // Google Analytics user tag dimension
var tag="";
if (HelpCenter && HelpCenter.user.tags) {
var staff_user = (HelpCenter.user.tags.indexOf("staff") > -1);
var paid_user = (HelpCenter.user.tags.indexOf("paid") > -1);
if (staff_user === true) {
tag = "staff";
}
else if (paid_user === true) {
tag = "paid";
} else {
tag = "other";
}
} else {
tag = "anonymous"
}
ga('set', 'dimension1', tag);
ga('send', 'event', 'ZenDesk', 'UserType', tag, {
nonInteraction: true,
});