Over time, you'll develop a good feel for how you want to use Owl Analytics.
Here, we walk through some common questions you might need to answer and the relevant Owl Analytics reports and drilldown reports that may help you answer them.
Do people use my knowledge base?
You can answer this question in a couple different ways, depending on whether you want a visualization to go with it or want detailed numbers about individual page statistics:
- Check the Overview report to view visits and visitors over time, average visit duration, bounce rate, and more. Use the line graph to review how you're trending and/or download it to share with others.
- Check the Pageviews report or Page titles report to view your most popular pages.
The time period controls in all these reports can help you determine if usage is increasing, decreasing, or holding steady over time.
Which regions draw the most viewers?
Check the Locations report to view aggregated information by geolocation.
Drill into the Row evolution graph for a given region or city to view even more detailed information.
How do people get to my knowledge base?
Check the Entry pages report to view the pages that your visitors start on.
For a given page, open the Transitions report or Segmented visits log to get more details about how they arrived here. The Transitions report is our favorite for this, and will work even if you don't have visit logs enabled in KB settings > Analytics.
What do people search for?
Check the Searches report to review what visitors are searching for.
If you have visitor logs enabled in KB settings > Owl Analytics, drill into individual searches using the Segmented visits log to understand what visitors did before and after their search. Did they end up on the page you expected?
How do people use or navigate my knowledge base?
You can view this information either by reviewing the logs for individual visits or by reviewing transitions or visits logs for specific pages:
- If you have visit logs enabled in KB settings > Owl Analytics, view the Logs report to review full visits and all the actions a visitor completed while they were in your knowledge base. This can be a great way to get a feel for how people navigate or search through your knowledge base.
- Check the Pageviews report or Page titles report to review any pages with views. Open the Transitions report or Segmented visits log to get more details about how people are navigating to and away from specific pages.
What resources do people download?
Check the Downloads report to view which knowledge base resources your viewers are downloading.
Refer to Download for more information on which downloads are tracked in your knowledge base.
Where do I lose viewers, and how can I fix that?
If you're trying to reduce people leaving your knowledge base from specific pages, you can do this in a couple different ways:
- Check the Exit pages report to view the pages people most often exit from.
- Sort by Exit/Exit rate. Review the pages with the highest rates.
- Open the Transitions report or Segmented visits log to get more details about what people are doing before or after viewing this page. This can add helpful context to determine if you need to review the content itself.
- Check the Pageviews report or Page titles report to review any pages with views.
- Sort by Bounce Rate or Exit Rate. Review the pages with the highest rates. These may be pages where you're losing readers and don't want to.
- Consider the page's content and purpose. Exits or bounces aren't necessarily a bad thing if the page explicitly answers a question or tells someone how to do something--they may be leaving because they found what they needed!
- Open the Transitions report or Segmented visits log to get more details about what people are doing before or after viewing this page. This can add helpful context to determine if you need to review the content itself.
For pages with problematic rates, review the content or the ways people navigated here. You may need to tweak the content itself, your content hierarchy, cross-references to this page from other pages, or search term optimization.
How can I assess page load times and improve performance?
If page load time or performance is a concern:
- Check the Exit pages report if you're worried about load times prompting exits; check the Pageviews report or Page titles report if you just want to review performance in general.
- Sort by Avg. Page Load Time.
- Review the pages with the longest load time. You may be able to split these into smaller subpages, remove slow-loading assets, or make other changes to tweak performance. Refer to Average page load time for more information about optimizing your performance.
What are my readers doing?
If you're using individual reader accounts and have Reader tracking turned on in KB settings > Analytics, use the Readers report to review what each of your readers has been up to.
Open the Segmented visits log to drill even further into their actions.
How can I contextualize these numbers?
The Transitions report is our favorite for having additional context in all the Behavior reports.
One of the worst things about analytics is having numbers with no context. Lack of context can make it very hard to know whether a given number is worth addressing and how to go about addressing it.
The Transitions report gives you a lot of context around the numbers. High bounce rates or exit rates by themselves aren't necessarily a bad thing, but without some context, it can be hard to figure out which pages' high rates are worth worrying about.
For example: One of the Support KB's most popular pages by views is Set your footer copyright year to automatically update, but it has a very high bounce rate of 94% and an exit rate of 98%.
First, we review the content: this is a set of instructions for something that's not a required action in KnowledgeOwl. At most, an author might set this up once when they're customizing their theme and then forget it.
Our Transitions report confirms that most of the traffic to this page comes from search engines: 318 out of 347 pageviews, and 326 of those views result in exits.
From this context, it seems pretty safe to say that this page is attracting a whole bunch of traffic from beyond our customer base, so we don't need to worry about our high bounce and exit rates.
