Last updated: 2021-01-07

Source: https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/50000002837-creating-a-custom-report-for-your-knowledge-base

In addition to using the curated reports to track your knowledge base, you can also create your own reports using custom reports. A custom report can consist of multiple widgets providing different insights about your knowledge base articles in one single view. These widgets can be customized the way you want.

This article will cover:

A quick guide to customizing a widget

  • Go to the Reports and analytics tab and click on Analytics
  • Once you are on the analytics page, click on the New Report button. Enter the name of your custom report and set the visibility
  • This opens a window that prompts you to enter the name of the widget and the module you are looking to analyze. Under the module drop-down, select Articles

  • Under Configure, you will be able to choose the metrics you want to track, and the group by fields.

    • ``` Tip: To track the number of articles created by a specific author each month choose Total articles as your metric, filter it based on the relevant Author and group by the Month of the Created date as shown in the image above. You can even add another group by field like Folder to understand the folders in which the articles were created each month. ```

  • You can add multiple metrics and relevant filters for each metric to focus on a specific dataset
  • Adding group by fields will enable you to group your data based on a category so that you get more context from the chart
  • These are the metrics, filters, and group by fields you will be able to use under the Article widgets:
    • MetricsDescription
    Article viewsPageviews of a specific article on your help center/support portal
    Article likesNumber of likes on an article given by anonymous and non-anonymous users
    Article dislikesNumber of dislikes on an article given by anonymous and non-anonymous users
    Article feedback ticketsNumber of tickets created by end-user feedback on an article
    Article suggestedNumber of times a link to an article was inserted in a ticket reply
    Articles createdNumber of articles created by your agents
    Articles updatedNumber of articles updated by your agents
    Articles approvedNumber of articles approved by your agents
    Articles publishedNumber of articles published by your agents
    Filters and Group by fieldsDescription
    Last approved dateThe date when the article was last approved
    Created dateThe date when the first article draft was created
    Last modified dateThe date when the article was last modified
    Last published dateThe date when the article was last published
    Article NameThe full title of an article
    LanguageLanguages in which your article content is available
    AuthorThe author of the article
    User nameName of the agent or contact who has viewed an article
    User typeClassifies the article views and feedback as Agent or contact
    Last modified byThe agent who last modified an article
    FolderThe folder created in your knowledge base
    CategoryThe categories created in your knowledge base
    PortalPortals created for multiple products/brands that you offer
  • Under the Filter tab, you will be able to apply basic or advanced filters for all the metrics that you are tracking in a widget.
  • With basic filters, you can define whether the data to be displayed has to match ALL/ANY of the specified conditions. Whereas with advanced filters, you can group multiple conditions under a filter group and define whether the data has to match ALL/ANY of the filter groups.
  • In the widget filters, you can also define the order in which the data has to be displayed using Rank order ( e.g., Top 10 viewed articles last month )
  • To customize the style of the widget the way you want, go to the Style tab

  • Once you have customized the widget using the three tabs, you can also select the type of chart to visualize the data in the best way possible

  • The table view right under the chart shows a drill-down of the data behind the chart. You can add or remove columns to this table so that the relevant article related fields are displayed

  • Save the widget once the customization is done

    • A quick guide to exporting your widget data

  • To export your widget data, click on the Export dropdown
  • You will have the option to export the CSV of the chart data or the tabular data
  • You can also schedule this widget to send the relevant file consisting of widget data to a specific agent or team

    • A quick guide to managing multiple widgets in your custom report

  • Once you have created and customized your first widget, you can go back to the custom report canvas
  • While adding widgets, you can drag and drop existing templates to create reports faster

  • Under the custom report filters, you can apply the basic/advanced filters and date range filters
  • The date range filters allow you to specify a duration which influences all the widgets in the custom reports

    • ``` Note: The date range can be applied to each widget by using the date range dimensions as a filter in the widget. The widget data can also be grouped by Days, Weeks, Months or Years of the date range. ```

  • In mode, you can also perform actions on the widget such as change visualization, clone to other pages or reports, and order the widget, right from the canvas

    • ``` Note: Knowledge base analytics will only show relevant data available after 8th June, 2020 in your Freshdesk account.

    The analytics for Knowledge base articles published on additional customer portals will show of data available after 11th November, 2020. ```