Exclude editing views from analytics

Related products: Analytics

I think it'd be nice to have some kind of "admin/docs mode" that I could enable when I'm working on cards (as opposed to actually referring to them in the course of support or whatever other work), so that my views of cards don't count in the data during that time. Right now, most of the "top users" (at least in terms of views) are me and other members of the docs team, so the data feels skewed. There's a difference between viewing a card in order to get information from it so I can answer a customer and viewing a card as a necessary step on the way to editing it.

(Does that make sense? I'm a little tired today and don't feel very good at words, ha.)
This can also skew data for the cards themselves, including the cards that just happen to be at the "top" of a collection/board/etc. and are therefore automatically shown as you navigate around.

This is definitely a big issue for us too. It makes our analytics questionable. 

While sometimes you do edit a card on the fly when working on ticket, there’s other times when a card is being edited as part of a review or bc it’s expired. 

  • What is the problem? Views that are the result of revising cards skew the analytics making them questionable. 

  • Who is it a problem for? Support teams who use the most viewed metric for making decisions about the content or training needs.  

  • How do you solve the problem today? Best guesses. 

  • How would you ideally solve the problem? A tick box when publishing to not count this view. 

  • How big is the problem (business impact, frequency of impact etc.)? The metric can’t be trusted. For example, one of our top 5 most viewed cards in the last 30 days has 27 views. More than half of those are from revisions and collaboration on that card. 11 are just the person who has been the main person working on it. 🤷‍♂️ 


Hi @BethAnne Freund & @Siobhan Hyser! Steph from Guru Product team here!

Thank you for the detailed feedback - it definitely makes sense to want to distinguish maintenance views vs usage views on a card. While we don’t have this functionality currently on our roadmap, I have an idea which I think may be helpful in getting closer to your analytics goals, and I would love feedback on it to help me better understand the overall paint-points you’re facing.

Idea: The filters in analytics currently provide a way to filter by group. So you could create a group that excludes primary card collaborators and use the filter to gather views only from users who are most likely only reading the cards within the collection - getting more accurate reading metrics.

Can you provide feedback on the above? If it helps, what’s helpful about it? If it doesn’t help can you tell me more about what’s missing/doesn’t work (e.g. the group of collaborators is huge)?

Thank you!!


Hey @Steph Kley - Thanks for the reply!  

Our card editors and users are the same so that won’t work. 

In addition, as an update to a card could take a few days reaching out to various other team members for confirmation of details/changes, the current editor could also be using the existing information that they know is correct to help with tickets. 

We need a more deliberate/delineated way to signal “only viewed to edit” vs “viewed to use on a ticket, may have done a quick update whilst viewing”. 

Something like a tick box to signal upon publishing to discount the view would be great. 

 


@Steph Kley Thanks for the suggestion!

 

I agree with @Siobhan Hyser here. Most of our Docs team is comprised of support agents who work on internal and customer-facing docs when they’re not doing frontline support, so they’re just as likely to be viewing the cards in the course of their support work as they are to be editing them in their docs role.

 

What Siobhan suggested could definitely work. I also want to reiterate my original idea of an “admin mode” that you could enable while you’re editing so that none of your views during the whole session “count”—maybe with an obvious banner reminding you that you’re in that mode so you remember to turn it off when you’re done.

 

I understand that you all don’t have anything like this planned right now, but thanks for listening to our feedback!


Just ran into another way this kinda messes things up. 

In card manager, I wanted to see cards not viewed in the last 90 days. 

But as soon as I click on a card to see what it’s about, it’s no longer in the list 😅

Being able to have an “admin” mode would be so great for that. Because now that card looks like it was viewed and also has an additional which messes up the stats for it.