KnowledgeOwl has a robust set of in-house analytics and reporting tools in Owl Analytics, but you're not required to use it.
Your organization might already use and collect consent for other third-party analytics tools like:
If you'd prefer to stick with a third-party tool, first turn off Owl Analytics.
Then add the third-party analytics tool of your choice. Most of these tools require you to embed a tracking code into your knowledge base, which you can do following these steps:
- Go to Customize > Style (HTML & CSS).
- In the Customize HTML, CSS, and JS section, select Custom <head>.
- Paste your embed code in here. We recommend adding a comment to indicate the day and person who added it, but that's entirely up to you!
- Be sure to Save.
Once your code is added to the Custom Head, your third-party analytics tool should start tracking data.
Check with the analytics provider of your choice for additional/more detailed setup instructions.
There are two ways you might want to capture search-related analytics information:
- Search engine terms: If your knowledge base is publicly available, you may want to know what search terms people searched for that brought them into your knowledge base
- Knowledge base search terms: You may want to see what terms people are searching for once they're in your knowledge base
Search engine terms
If your knowledge base is publicly available, you may want to know how random people performing searches are finding your knowledge base. The de facto standard for this currently is Google Search Console. You don't need to use Google Analytics to use Google Search Console, which is a tool tied to Google's search engine itself. See their Getting Started guide for more information.
Google has kept fairly tight control over these things, but some third-party analytics tools offer integrations with Google Search Console to pull its data directly into their own platforms (Plausible can, for example). So while you may need to set up Google Search Console to get some of this info, you may not have to use Google's interface or tools directly after you've done that. 😉
If you're already using or already plan to use a third-party analytics tool, check to see if it has a Google Search Console integration.
Knowledge base search terms
Some analytics tools provide analytics and reporting around search terms so you can see what people are searching for in your knowledge base itself. Owl Analytics does this in our Searches report.
If you're using a third-party tool, it may take some research to find the settings or feature you need. For example:
- Google Analytics calls this Site Search
- FullStory suggests capturing this in a Top Search Terms metric
Review what options your analytics tool offers for this kind of analysis.
When searches are performed in your knowledge base, we adjust the URL to include: /search?phrase={search phrase}&Search=
You should be able to target that search?phrase={search phrase} portion to get a list of terms.
For customers with knowledge bases that require login, one of the most common questions we get asked in the analytics and reporting discussion is: can I see what individual readers are doing in my knowledge base?
Owl Analytics offers two ways to do this:
- With or without readers, you can enable visits logs to view detailed click-through visit histories for individual visitors. Refer to Set up Owl Analytics for more setup instructions. Refer to Logs report to review the information we track and share.
- With readers, enable reader tracking to view a Readers report summarizing readers' actions and drill into a Segmented visits log to view visits logs for individual readers. (Note this setting may not be available at all plan levels.)
If you prefer not to use Owl Analytics for this, turn off Owl Analytics and explore other tools.
You have a couple options:
- Use a general-purpose analytics tool like Google Analytics
- Pros: These tools can handle a lot of analytics and reporting needs. Many are free or quite reasonably priced.
- Cons: Many of these general analytics tools (Google included) don't want you storing personally identifiable information for individuals within their platforms, so you'll need to pass over the reader's ID from KnowledgeOwl and use that ID to generate reports.
- Use an analytics tool geared toward individual analytics, like FullStory or Mixpanel. These tools often include session recordings or other metrics.
- Pros: These tools are built to handle reporting and analytics at the individual level, so they have a lot of tooling around it.
- Cons: These tools are generally more costly analytics tools. They may also require additional disclosures or cookie notifications, since you'd be capturing information about your readers outside of KnowledgeOwl's or your own organizations' systems.
