The following are some tips and ideas for how to get the most out of the information in Help Center Analytics.
In this Article
Find the Locations in your Help Center where Visitors submitted most Tickets
Analyze Internal Use vs External Use of the Help Center
Compare the Help Center Performance over Two Periods of Time
Track the Performance after a Major Help Center or Article Update
Making Direct Contact with your Signed In Customers or Agents
Excluding Traffic that is Not from your Customers
Analyzing what Visitors are Searching For
Identifying Articles that have not been Viewed
Analyzing the Time Visitors Spend Reading your Articles
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 can indicate 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.
The Conversion % calculation is based on the actual number of tickets created after an article visit. Help Center Manager tracks the following:
- The visitor journey between the articles.
- The contact form (when the user submits the form, not just when they visit the form).
- The ticket created in your Zendesk Help Center.
If a visitor reads an article and then creates a new ticket through a different channel (such as through email or WhatsApp) this is included in the Conversion % calculation. However, this is only possible for visitors who logged in or have submitted a contact form at least once, so that Help Center Manager can access their email address (encrypt it and hash it) and use that as an identifier.
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 helps 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.
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 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.
Refer to Using the Dates and the Filters in Analytics.
Analyzing what Visitors are Searching For
The Search tab in Analytics offers various ways that you can analyze what your visitors are searching for, and check any instances where they are not finding information easily.
- The Search in Analytics displays the exact words and phrases that visitors are entering when they search for information in your Help Center. This helps you understand what your visitor are searching for and how they are searching.
- Where a visitor searched for a word or phrase and this was
- You can use this information to add an additional article, or an FAQ article.
- Or, you can include additional text in existing articles and include the words or phrases in the way that your visitors are entering their searches.
- The Search Metrics detail the actions visitors take before and after searching. This allows you to check, for example, if visitors are then going to the article you consider to be the most important, or if visitors are having to make additional searches to find the information in your Help Center.
- If a visitor runs a search, and then creates a Helpdesk ticket using the
- You can use this information to add an additional article, or an FAQ article.
- Or, if the information is already in your Help Center, the relevant article(s) may not be showing high enough up in the Zendesk search results. You could add Labels to the article in Zendesk, or make changes to the article Title so that it appears higher in the search results.
Refer to Search Analytics.
Identifying Articles that have not been Viewed
In the Analytics Content tab, you can use the Viewed filter to identify articles that have not been viewed by any visitors within the selected period. This can help you decide whether certain articles should be updated, relocated, or retired, or if the article title or label needs to be changed so that the article is found more easily. Refer to Analytics Content.
Analyzing the Time Visitors Spend Reading your Articles
In the Analytics Performance Overview, Analytics Content and in the Visitor' Journey, the Reading Time displays the average reading duration, in seconds, for individual articles and cumulatively across your Help Center (for the selected date period and filters).
This allows you to gauge the time visitors invest in your articles and can help identify content that may require adjustments, understand readers' engagement levels, and also to estimate bot traffic by observing views with little or no engagement.
Refer to Analytics Performance Overview, Analytics Content, Displaying Article Metrics for a Specific Article and the Visitor's Journey.