A detailed knowledge base is critical to your online business. Getting visitors to your site and to consider your product is a huge challenge in itself. It’s an opportunity you don’t want to squander, but you will if you don’t have a valuable knowledge base.
There are numerous ways to develop your knowledge base and it’s going to evolve as your product and customer continue to mature. The knowledge base you have when you first launch your product is going to look completely different than the one you have two years after launch.
The major differentiator between your first knowledge base and your latest one is a number of data points your customer support team has. Through customer development, user interviews, live chat, and customer tickets, you’re going to build up a database of relevant questions that potential customers have about your product.
In addition to these support tool options, there’s one more way to get great information for your knowledgebase: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is the gold standard of web analytics. It’s free and robust. It offers analytics that any business can leverage for growth. Of its many uses, one of the more underrated uses of Google Analytics is its role with your knowledge base.
Google Analytics’ features provide vital information that can be interpreted for growth within customer success. These five reports in Google Analytics will help your team pinpoint information about your visitors’ behavior. This, in turn, allows you to grow your knowledge base with the given data.
In part one of two blog posts, we will address some of the key places to go to build your knowledge base with the assistance of Google Analytics.
Landing Pages
Google killed off one of my favorite features a while ago…a breakdown of keywords that people were searching for to find your site. The next best thing is reviewing your Landing Pages report.
To access this data, find Behavior on the left navigation of Google Analytics. There, you’ll see an option for Site Content. Click that to get a dropdown of more options. Here you’ll see Landing Pages.
The Landing Page data gives you insights what problems people have and what their first interaction is with your site. These Landing Pages aren’t necessarily the dedicated landing pages your team created, but rather the first page a visitor interacts with on your site.
The list of pages the Landing Page summary gives you will vary. It’s going to be a combination of individual pages on your site (like happyfox.com/ticket-support-system), individual blog posts, or dedicated landing pages. Take particular note at the blog posts that are driving visitors.
These blog topics are providing valuable insights as to what’s important to your visitors. Posts like “5 Incredible Ways to Use Customer Service to Boost Sales” or “10 Ecommerce Mistakes You Need to Avoid” shed light on why people are interested in your product. Highlighting features and common questions users in specific industries can help you create a knowledge base that answers the questions they need to know before purchase.
Analyzing Landing Pages will help you better understand your visitors’ needs. The more information you have on them will help you develop more valuable content.
Content Drilldown
Content Drilldown is another great aspect of Google Analytics for your knowledge base. It is just above Landing Pages within the Behavior section in Google Analytics. Unlike Landing Pages, Content Drilldown offers a look at specific pages and content visitors are taking a look at. You can “drill down” deeper within each page path level.
With Content Drilldown, you can start at the top-level knowledge base page and dig to find specific articles visitors are reading.
Customer support can separate your business from its competitors and close more sales. A poor customer service experience will put a sour taste in prospects’ mouths, sabotaging sales.
By determining the most popular articles in your existing knowledge base, you’re able to prioritize what content your visitors want to know. With this information, are there ways you can reformat your knowledge base to better highlight these questions? Do you have a Top Articles section at the top of your knowledge base? Do the current articles still reflect the most pressing questions visitor have?
If you can shorten the amount of time visitors have to spend looking for answers, then your knowledge base is doing its job.
Revisit these articles and determine how accurate and valuable they still are. Can you make these articles even more clear and concise? Is the article still effectively answering the question?
Stay tuned for Part 2, which will be published July 26th!
At HappyFox, we know a lot about building a successful knowledgebase for your customers. Click here to learn about everything we can do to help you get your knowledge base set up for success.
