How to use the Analytics information
The following are some tips and ideas for how to get the most out of the information in Help Center Analytics.
Find the Locations in your Help Center where Visitors submitted most Tickets
At the bottom of all articles there is link for Have more questions? Submit a request. Visitors can use this to create a Helpdesk ticket directly from the article and information about the ticket is recorded in the Analytics. This shows as the Conversion % so you can identify articles, categories or sections that are not performing well in terms of ticket deflection. The Conversion % metric is calculated as the percentage of article visits that converted to tickets.
One of the ways in which you can look at this metric is to sort the Analytics Content table on the Conversion % column in descending order. The higher the Conversion % metric indicates means poor performance. By displaying the Content for Category or Section, you can see any overall areas of the Help Center for which visitors are submitting tickets directly from the articles. Refer to Analytics Content.
You can also view the number of tickets that were created immediately after an article was visited. Where the visitor was a signed in user, Analytics also displays a list of the tickets with a link to the tickets in your Helpdesk. You can use this to read the tickets to understand why the article did not answer what the customer was looking for and use your findings to improve the article. Refer to Create a new ticket in Displaying Article Metrics for a Specific Article and the Visitor's Journey.
Analyze Internal Use vs External Use of the Help Center
You can look separately at the internal traffic to understand how the support team interacts with the Help Center. This help you to promote the Help Center internally and encourage your staff to use it in their conversations with customers. To look at the metrics for internal traffic, use the filter for Visitors and set this as "Staff" and/or "End Users".
In the same way, if you want to see only the actual users who were visiting the Zendesk Help Center, you can exclude "Staff" in the filter for Visitors. This lets you exclude any activity from your staff members who are set up as Zendesk users and who are working on maintenance and update of the Help Center articles.
Refer to Using the Dates and the Filters in Analytics.
Compare the Help Center Performance over Two Periods of Time
By selecting Compare to previous period, you can compare the metrics over two periods of time, either for the overall activity or for a single article/category/section. This can help to see if changes made to the help center made an impact, and if you are on the right track. It can also help you to spot trends in the activity in your Help Center. Refer to Date Selector in Using the Dates and the Filters in Analytics.
Track the Performance after a major Help Center or Article update
Where you have new or updated articles, the Article Metrics help you track the number of visitors and their responses. You can also see which other articles visitors are going to before and after. This can be useful to check activity for the specific articles that relate to new information or products, and when you have updates.
The listing in View other websites in the Article Metrics can be useful to see where the visitor accessed the article from, for example, if they displayed the article from a link on your website or social media such as your Facebook page.
Refer to What Visitors do Before and After this Article in Displaying Article Metrics for a Specific Article and the Visitor's Journey.
Giving Visitors an Opportunity to Send you a Feedback Comment if they did not find an Article Helpful
You can install the Feedback form which allows you to collect concrete feedback from visitors who voted No for "Was this article helpful?". You can then use the comments in the visitor's feedback to improve the articles. Refer to Step 2 (optional): Install the feedback form in Setting up Help Center Analytics and to Analytics Feedback.
Making Direct Contact with your Signed In Customers or Agents
Where the visitor was signed in, as a customer or agent, you can see who read an article, voted on an article or added Feedback. This allows you to reach out directly to him or her to and collect more feedback. Refer to Most Recent Visitors, Most Recent Article Votes and Most Recent Feedback from Visitors in Displaying Article Metrics for a Specific Article and the Visitor's Journey.
Excluding Traffic that is Not from your Customers
If you think you have activity for article views that is not from your Customers, you can check if you are getting a lot of article views where Arriving From shows as "Direct". These could be due to bots generating the traffic. You can use the Filter for Arriving From and exclude "Direct" to exclude these from the Analytics as it is unlikely they are not your customers.
Also, if your Help Center includes articles that could also relate to generic searches, such as for operating system information (for example, Microsoft Windows) or information for other applications (such as Microsoft Word or Excel) you may get visitors from search engines. You can check if you are getting a lot of article views where Arriving From shows as "Google Search" and "Bing Search". In the same way, you can exclude the search engines in the Filter for Arriving From.