Google Analytics provides tools for everything from search analytics to visitor tracking that can be used to improve your self-service option in Zoho Desk. You can use the statistics to learn, for example, how long your customers look at the KBase articles, if customers use the landing page and utilize the content there, or what keywords the customers search for while accessing the Help Center. Although these statistics allows you to scope out your Help Center from every angle, it can be overwhelming when you don't know what you're looking for. This is where the Google Analytics dashboard for your Help Center comes to save you, as it brings all of your KPIs and critical metrics into an artfully designed and intuitive display with information streams updated in real-time – all within Zoho Desk.
The Google Analytics dashboard provides the following insights to help you track and trend how your customers are interacting with your Help Center:
- Site Visit Report
- Site Traffic by Source
- Site Traffic by Location
- Page Visits
Let's looks into each of these dashboard elements in more details.
Site Visit Report
Just having a Help Center is not enough. It’s important to know where your visitors are coming from. The Site Visit report helps break down your traffic sources into the following four categories with a graphical representation of each source.
Direct Visits: Also known as "organic traffic," it is the total number of visits as a result of the user typing your Help Center URL on a browser or through browser bookmarks. Keep in mind that the number of Direct visits is often higher as Google Analytics categorizes all the traffic for which the source could not be identified as "Direct."
Email Visits: It is the traffic driven to your help center through emails. This metric is useful if you run email campaigns that send traffic to an article or the Help Center as a whole. Keep in mind that you’ll need to tag each of the link placed in your emails using campaign or UTM variables. Otherwise, it will simply end up as direct traffic.
Referral Visits: Visitors that come to your Help Center from sites other than the major search engines are considered referral traffic. It indicates how much the content you've linked on other sites drives visitors to your Help Center.
Total Visits: Total Visits counts each visit to your Help Center, even if the same user has returned more than once.
In addition to traffic sources, the report provides the following key metrics about your Help Center.
Pages/Visit: Once users arrive at your Help Center, they will search around on a few more pages. The Pages/Visit is the average measure of how many pages they view within a session. This number indicates how compelling and easily navigated your content is.
Avg. Time on Site: This number indicates how much time users spend reading your Help Center content in a session. The higher the average time on site, the more interesting and engaging your Help Center is for your users.
% New Visits: New Visits are from those users who are navigating to your site for the first time. % New Visits indicates the percentage of new visits as a proportion of all visits. It helps you determine how many of your new customers are seeking help from the KBase or the community.
% Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your Help Center from the landing page without visiting further pages. The higher the bounce rate, the less effective the landing article is. In which case, it must be optimized for search engines or reworked to address the problem better.
Site Traffic by Source
Figuring out how users are getting to your Help Center, helps you know where to focus your attention. This report reveals to you how your users found your Help Center by categorizing visitors as direct, organic, email, social, referral, etc.
Here are some examples of traffic sources:
- “google” (search engine)
- “gsmarena.com” (referral site)
- “zylker_news” (email campaign)
- “direct” (users that typed your URL directly into their browser)
On the report, you can toggle to view All Traffic, Referral or Email. Each source will also indicate the number of page views and unique page views, average time spent on site, bounce rate and exit rate.
Site Traffic by Location
View where your users are visiting from in the form of a map that indicates the traffic based on location. You can hover your mouse over a country to see exactly how many users came to at least one page on your Help Center. Location data can be useful for targeting your content to the right audience and for identifying the languages for translation.
Page Visits
The Page Visits dashboard provides traffic insights for individual pages of your Help Center. It consists of the following metrics:
- Page Views - Displays the total number of views your Help Center pages received.
- Unique Page Views - Displays the total number of unique views your Help Center pages received. It is a measure of the actual number of visitors, rather than the number of visits.
- Avg. Time on Site - Displays the average time spent on individual pages by a user.
- Bounce Rate - Displays the percentage of visitors that leave a particular page without visiting further pages.
- Exit - Displays the rate of visitors leaving your pages.
Accessing Google Analytics Dashboard
You can access Google Analytics Dashboard in the KB module. The dashboard comes pre-configured only if you've set up the Google Analytics integration in your Zoho Desk.
To access the dashboard:
- Click the Knowledge Base (KB) module.
You'll land on the articles list page. - Select the Dashboard tab in the left panel.
- Click Google Analytics under the Dashboard sub-menu.
- Select the Google Analytics profile you would like to use from the drop-down menu.
- Select a date range to limit the dashboard to.
The dashboard will start to display data for the period selected.