Knowledge Management Reports: Views by Browser, Ratings, Topic Growth

[servicenowkevin]

I know I've posted a lot about report creation and importance and talked a bit about reports I use, but it's a topic that always comes up and people always seem interested in it. So, I'm putting together another blog about it again today. Korbey Sellen mentioned in a comment earlier in the week that they'd be interested in knowing about the reports I run.

First, most of the reporting I do is in the Reports section, but I will make use of Performance Analytics for a few things.

Public KB Views by Browser

We had a desire to see which browsers were being used to access our content. With some customization, we were able to start collecting that data and Erich Zirnhelt put together this report so that we can start to track the browsers used to search our Knowledge Base articles.

Tracking the public views by browser tells you which internet browser is more popular and which you should lean to accommodate when creating KB articles. You wouldn't want to create a bunch of very important articles that are only compatible with Internet Explorer and not with Chrome, if Chrome is where the majority of your audience is viewing the articles from, right?

Knowledge Article Ratings

This report gives me the average rating across article topics over the past 30 days. I use it to track our KB quality. I want to always be above a 4 star average. If I see an area trending lower, I have a look at the articles with lower ratings and make a judgement call on what to do. Sometimes it's just a bad news article other times it's an article that actually needs updating.

The report captures internal and customer ratings as well as ratings on drafted content, though none of our drafted content has been rated in the past 30 days, that isn't a surprise. Our content doesn't get much activity until it's actually published.

Tracking View Growth by Topic

If we're getting more viewership, where are those viewing coming? Are the views coming from somewhere we expected growth because me made a big push there and other areas that we thought would reduce? This report allows me to answer those questions and focus in on areas where I'm expecting more viewership.

Views aren't the whole story here though. For this report, I need to look at incident volume as well. If I'm seeing higher incident volume in one area, I want to make sure we have content there and have the content viewed/used. I expect correlation between viewership and incident volume, either slowing the rate of volume increase or even reducing the volume.

Got a question about these reports or any other I might be using? Is there a report you'd like to build, but you're not sure if it's possible? I might be able to answer that too... no promises though. I sometimes enlist people to help me with these. Let me know in the comments.