We encourage you, early on, to think about what kind of reporting and analytics you might need in your knowledge base.
KnowledgeOwl provides two types of reporting:
- Reporting > Owl Analytics: Detailed, visit- and visitor-specific analytics
- Reporting > Dashboard: High-level reporting, searches with no results
There are two main reasons you might want to use reporting, feedback, and analytics tools:
- To provide feedback/tracking that influences your content decisions (content management)
- To measure the success of your knowledge base (measuring success)
We discuss each in a bit more detail below.
Reporting for content management
For feedback directly from readers, consider these KnowledgeOwl features:
- Ratings (thumbs up/thumbs down or 5 stars), comes with built-in reporting
- Comments
- Contact Form
Owl Analytics can give you:
- Views split out by geographic location, visitor, or logged-in reader account
- Entry pages and exit pages
- Searches
- Downloads
- From most of those reports, access drilldown Transitions report and Segmented visits log to view click-through, actions completed, time on each page, etc.
The high-level Reporting available in KnowledgeOwl might meet a lot of your explicit reporting needs, too.
Additional data sources
For content management reporting, you might also want to check with your support team or help ticketing system to see if there are ways to get reports on what features, policies, services, or whatever your customers are asking about. These can be a great source of new content ideas, but you'd rarely see them surfaced within the knowledge base!
Reporting for measuring success
If you worked through Purpose & audience, you should have a sense of the ultimate goal for your knowledge base: how will you know if your knowledge base is successful?
Owl Analytics reports might be a piece of how you measure success. This can include things like:
- Monthly number of distinct viewers or views in the Overview report
- Reduction of support tickets submitted on xx after launch of knowledge base
- Demonstrated ticket deflection using the Contact form reporting
- Reduction in average amount of time a support person spends answering a ticket
- And so on
These reporting requirements can be a bit trickier. Why? Two reasons: first, defining success can be hard. Second: just because you can generate a number on something doesn't mean that number is a good measure for what you're trying to measure.
Review what information is available in the Owl Analytics reports. Coordinate with teammates handling support, customer experience, quality assurance, or more to be able to capture some baseline numbers from before your knowledge base is launched and then to capture updated numbers to compare against at set intervals (monthly, quarterly, etc.).
Third-party tools
You can also Turn off Owl Analytics and use a third-party analytics tool of your choice.
Most analytics tools are added by accessing the Custom Head. KnowledgeOwl allows you to add scripts and code to your Custom Head, so you should be able to set up most third-party tools.
We had previously tried tools like:
- Plausible - a more privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics, though it does cost money. No cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR. Made and hosted in the EU.
- FullStory - good for tracking individual viewing history/actions; can record reader sessions
- Hotjar - good for heatmaps and behavior analytics (useful if you are considering a redesign/layout changes)
