It’s important to know how your content is performing, so that you know how to improve it. On your Articles report, you’ll quickly see which articles to write next, what’s popular and most importantly, which articles need improving.
Get insights on which keywords are driving more and better results, as well as searched keywords with no results, and know which articles triggered the most conversations and negative reactions.
You can also see where your content is performing best, and who is engaging with it the most with location, source and audience filtering.
Learn from your Articles report
Find the report under Reports > Customer support > Articles:
Then toggle the date range at the top to see how your content has performed in the time period you'd like to measure.
Get an overview of your Help Center traffic
The first thing you’ll see in this report is an overview of unique visitors, and article views:
The count on the left is the total number of unique people who have viewed at least one Article in your Help Center.
Article views is the total number of Article views in your Help Center. This includes articles viewed by the same person multiple times.
Refine your results with filters
For a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your content, you’ll find two other filters at the top of the report:
Filter the report by audience
Choose visitors, leads, users, or a combination of the three and get a better idea of who is engaging with your content. Some questions you can answer, and next steps to take:
Which articles are viewed most by visitors? — What are the first things people want to know about your product?
You could create an F.A.Q collection and link to it from your website.
Which articles are viewed more by leads than other people? — Which articles help people during their buying journey?
Try sharing these articles with trial users towards the end of their trial, or covering these topics in sales demos.
Filter the report by location
Choose Help Center or Messenger and see exactly where your articles are being read. This filter is particularly helpful when used in conjunction with the audience filter:
Which articles are viewed most by your Users in the Messenger? — Which areas of your product are causing the most confusion, and are there things you can do to alleviate it?
This could be as simple as linking proactively to articles from the features they cover, or even making changes to those areas that your customers have trouble with.
Filter the report by source
If you select "Messenger" in the location filter, you'll see one more filter added, "Source":
This filter gives you another level of zoom to understand how your articles are being used.
From article search shows all articles found via searching in the Messenger.
Inserted in home shows all articles viewed directly from the home screen (added with the Article Inserter app.
Sent in a conversation shows articles sent in conversations by both bots and teammates using the Article Inserter app.
See which articles to review
View Article engagement section
Scroll down and you’ll see the ‘Article engagement’ section - this shows you the number of people who viewed an article and if they had any reactions or conversations for the period selected. Simply select whichever heading you’d like to sort the results by:
Pro tip: Here’s how to improve articles that get negative reactions based on rich customer data.
Note: You’ll also see the date each article was last updated. If an article hasn’t been updated in quite some time, review it to ensure the content is still accurate and relevant.
If you support multiple languages in your Help Center, the data in this report is an aggregate of views, reactions, and conversations on all language versions of each article.
Filtering Article engagement
Filter article engagements to show only articles that received a certain amount of viewers. For example, filter by articles with “Viewers greater than 10” to see your most popular articles in the selected period:
Drill down further by adding another filter. For example, you could filter by articles with “Negative reactions greater than 1” to quickly identify popular articles that may need your attention:
You can also view article reactions and conversations as a percentage of the number of people who viewed the article over the selected period. This is useful for seeing patterns, for example, you might see a correlation between negative reactions and conversations started.
Explore article engagement further by clicking on the article title to access a drawer with the article’s overall engagement:
Note: This shows the article performance of all time, starting from the date the article was first published.
Scroll down in the drawer to see specific “Customers who replied” to an article (conversations). You can click on each reply to find out why they started a conversation after viewing the article:
Know what to improve
View Search with results section
Further down the report you will find the ‘Search with results’ section - this shows you the performance of keywords searched by your customers and helps you identify which keywords are driving better results.
You can filter these keywords for the period selected by:
Searches - how many times a keyword has been used in search.
Click-through rate - a ratio of users who click on at least one article in the search results to the total number of users who viewed those results.
Articles shown - average number of articles shown in the search results.
For example, you can identify high performing articles by their click-through rate:
Note: A click-through rate of 51.22% (as shown above) means that roughly half of users who searched for that keyword, ended up clicking on an article from the search results. A click-through rate over 100% means that users have clicked on more than one article from the search results.
Click on a keyword to access a drawer showing the articles that appeared in the search results. You can see each article’s engagements (Views, Reactions and Conversations) and how high the article ranked in the search results:
Note: Articles are listed in the order they rank in search results.
This view is great for spotting articles that have ranked highly in the search results but might be getting mixed reactions because they’re not providing the information customers are looking for.
As an example, you could take corrective action after identifying an article ranks high in the search results for the keyword, but it has received mixed reactions and started lots of conversations:
View Searches with no results section
The ‘Searches with no results’ section of the report shows you which terms customers searched for most, but didn’t find any results. You should write an article for each topic customers would find useful.
How often does the Articles report update?
Your Articles report gets updated once a day (midnight for your timezone).
Improve your content based on your Insights
There’s a bunch of simple ways you can improve your content from the data you see in your report. We’ve written these best practice articles to help you:
Changes to the way Articles are reported
On October 19th, 2021 we made changes to the way we report the view count of Articles. Article views are now counted for users who are using an Adblocker, or have disabled JavaScript, which previously stopped views from being counted. This means that you could potentially see an increase in Help Center views as a result of the inclusion of these users in reporting after October 19th, 2021.
Will this change impact Google Analytics users?
For customers using Google Analytics, there will be no change to the view count in Google Analytics, because views are recorded by the Google Analytics script.
What’s next?
Now that you can see what customers are searching for vs. what they have found and how they engaged with that content, you can close the loop between content and search and improve your Help Center strategy.