Widget reporting

This section displays the Page Paths of all pages where someone opened the widget and/or where recommended articles have been configured.

You can then use the Recommended Article Weights link next to each URL to update the order.

In the contextual help widget, the Recommended tab is populated using the Pages to Recommend On setting. But how does the widget determine the order to display those in?

It uses article weights.

What are article weights?

You set which articles appear in the widget for a given page using the Recommend on Pages field. Refer to Use widget for contextual help for more information on using this feature.

When the widget loads from a page and pulls the Recommended list, it uses a set of weights to determine the order:

• Anything you've explicitly assigned automatically gets a Starting Weight of 1.
• Each time an end-user searches in the widget from this page for something else, we track that and record a small Learned Bias for the search. Once an article earns enough total weight, it is displayed in the Recommended articles list. These articles all have a starting weight of 0. You can also set the widget to never show articles that only have a learned bias using the Widget setting to Exclude articles that have a zero starting weight. Refer to the Suggested Content section of the Widget Admin Settings section for information on using this setting.
• Each time any article is opened from the widget for a given a page path, we increment the Learned Bias field.
• To determine the display order, the widget uses the Total Weight (the Starting Weight + Learned Bias). It displays the highest weights at the top.

All of this information is stored and displayed in Reporting > Widget.

To change the order of articles as they appear in the Recommended tab, you can:

• Add or remove this page path from the article or category's Recommend on Pages. This changes the Starting Weight (1 for recommended; 0 for not).
• Edit the Learned Bias field for this article or category in the Recommended Article Weights for this page path in Reporting > Widget pages.

Refer to the step-by-step instructions in Edit article weights and the Article weight editing case study below for more guidance.

Edit article weights

To change the order of recommended articles:

1. Go to Reporting > Widget.
2. Find the URI for the page whose Recommended Articles you'd like to change the order of, and click the Recommended Article Weights link for it:
   The page updates to display Articles Associated with "[your-page-path]".
3. The Articles Associated with page displays a list of all the articles that the widget is aware of on that page path.
4. The Starting Weight is either 0 or 1. All pages set using Pages to Recommend on have a starting weight of 1; all pages added here as a result of end-user search have a starting weight of 0.
5. Edit the Learned Bias to move an article in the list. The Total Weight is what determines the order, with the highest weight at the top of the list, and the lowest weight at the bottom.
6. When you're done making changes, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Update Bias to save your changes.

Article weight editing case study

The changes make more sense if you can think through them all the way, so let's use an example.

Let's say I'm reviewing the article list for what our Help > In-app help link should display in the Recommended tab from our Articles page.

When I open the Articles Associated with... page, here are the entries in it:

The three articles I've explicitly recommended here (with Starting Weight of 1, those are "Create a category", "Article creation guide", and "Reorder and move categories") are being served low in the list due to really high Learned Bias on other articles.

One way to solve this is to turn off displaying articles which only have Learned Bias for my widget overall. This is the Exclude articles that have a zero starting weight option in the Suggested Content section of the Widget's Admin Settings. Refer to Widget Admin Settings section for more details on working with these settings.

But I can also make changes specifically for this page:

• It seems like "Edit an article" and "Edit a category" get opened frequently from this page, so I edit those both to add this page path as a Recommend On Pages path. This sets their Starting Weight to 1.
• I edit the Learned Bias field for all of the articles so I can better control the order, setting the things I want listed first to the highest bias.

After these changes, my page might instead look like this:

The widget will now display these articles in this order on my Recommended tab:

1. Create a category
2. Article creation guide
3. Reorder and move categories
4. Edit an article
5. Edit a category