Help Center user segmentation using Google Analytics custom dimensions

Hey @Peter,

You're correct that this is a bit of legacy of the Zendesk product evolving over time. Many times when we update user facing labels in code, the internal representation in the database and other systems doesn't necessarily get the same update to avoid any unforeseen consequences. Additionally a few other roles can have admin privileges like Team Leader or a user with the Help Center Manager permission.

There are 4 possible values in the context of HelpCenter.user.role

"manager", "agent", "end_user", "anonymous"

Let me know if that answers your question.

Hi Ryan - thanks for the quick response.  Can you provide a table showing how the standard user roles in the interface map to the JSON values in session?

Like this...

Administrator >> Manager

Agent >> Agent

etc

Hey Peter,

That will depend on your user roles and your account plan level. If you have created custom roles on Enterprise, any role with the Help Center Manager role will be reported as "manager".

You can see more here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662026-Creating-custom-roles-and-assigning-agents-Enterprise-

But based on the predefined Enterprise roles, you would have:

• Legacy Agent - "agent"
• Light Agent - "agent"
• Staff - "agent"
• Team Leader - "manager"
• Advisor - "agent"
• Administrator - "manager"

End user is anyone that has a log in but is not an agent or manager. Anonymous is anyone browsing your Help Center while not logged in. I hope this helps.

Thanks!

I wanted to include user.id in what I am sending to google analytics, but for some reason it does not seem to be working. I went through the steps listed and created 3 dimensions, the user.role, user.locale, and user.id. I can see the user.role and user.locale being populated but user.id is not. Any reason this might be? 

//Capture User Role
 ga('send', 'event', 'Help Center', 'User', {

'dimension1': HelpCenter.user.role,

'dimension2': HelpCenter.user.locale,
 
'dimension3': HelpCenter.user.id,

nonInteraction: true

});

Thanks!

It looks like the reason that HelpCenter.user.id does not work is because it is not available in the javascript object. 

https://gist.github.com/skipjac/8186753 

I can see that the HelpCenter.user.identifier is available but this seems like it might be some sort of a hashed id value. Is there any documentation anywhere that I can refer to to understand how this value is hashed to decrypt this value into my user ids?

Hey Dan!

This identifier is actually a 1 way sha1 hash of the user id so you can't decrypt it. However, you could potentially user the email address in the user object for this. That should be a unique identifier for the user.

You can also use the API endpoint /api/v2/users/me.json to get the current user information, including id.

Thanks!

I just realized the below comment won't work. Please disregard

***

I also just realized that we also have the user object in the template that you could use as well to assign a variable in JavaScript.

*** 

Thanks!

Hi, could anyone help me make a segment from a website that is not structured with " / " ?

Resurrecting this article.

So I am trying to create a custom dimension in GA for user role.

1) I have GA activated and see out of box reports and dashboards populated.

2) I added this to the script.js file

//send user role to Google Analytics

var userRole = HelpCenter.user.role;
ga('set', 'dimension1', userRole);
ga('send', 'pageview');

});

I went into Chrome DEV Tools and saw no errors.

3) I logged into GA and create a custom dimension

If this all looks correct  how to I add a criteria to a custom report to filter on end users?

Do I need a specific value for dimension and filter?

Hi 868670416, you're almost there. The final piece of the puzzle is to create a custom segment that uses the values recorded by your custom dimension.

You'll see an 'Add Segment' box at the top of most of the GA reporting pages:

Click on this, then on 'New Segment':

Then select 'Conditions', under the 'Advanced' heading on the side-panel:

From there you'll need to search for your custom dimension in the first conditional select menu (mine is called User Role, yours would be userRole):

Change the operator from 'contains' to 'exactly matches', and then select the value you want to segment (i.e. end_user, anonymous, agent etc.).

That should be all there is to it.

Hey there!

I'm trying to get this to work, and I just can't seem to capture the user roles in Google Analytics, when I search it keeps coming up with nothing. I've added a custom segment like the previous comment advised, and when I try to search it still comes up with nothing.

This is the code I've added to the Help Center:

Hi there,

Could anyone advise what would be the best way to set up this type of segmentation using user tags?

User role is good, but user locale isn't useful in our case. Tags however capture various user attributes like country, department etc that I'd love to be able to dissect the data by.

For example when we see that users search for "bike scheme" with zero search results but do not know from which location, it's difficult for us to make useful changes to content, to address the issue. Being able to break this down by user tag country would be very helpful.

Thanks

Catherine

Hey @Catherine Michalak,

Tags are available in JavaScript via the following attribute

HelpCenter.user.tags

This is an array of the tags on the user, so it needs to be handled a little differently. Let's say you had dimension1 set to userCountry or something like that. You could then iterate over the set of tags and try to map tags to the dimensions you'd like to set. It might look something like this:

Array.prototype.forEach.call(HelpCenter.user.tags, function(tag) { 
  var countries = ['germany', 'uk', 'denmark', 'france']; 
  if (countries.includes(tag)) { 
    ga('set', 'dimension1', tag); 
  }
});

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for this.

I'm quite new to the coding world and so have some basic questions.

Which of the values in the above code would i need to replace? Do I need to list out all existing country tags?

Our user profiles depending on location would have one of these tags for example (country:netherlands, country:united_kingdom, country:spain, etc). We have users in over a 100 countries.

Thanks

Catherine

Good questions. So since you have tags set up with country: as the prefix, it'll probably make this a bit easier. Here's how I think this could work in your case:

Array.prototype.forEach.call(HelpCenter.user.tags, function(tag) { 
  var match = tag.match(/country:(\w+)/); 
  if (match) { 
    ga('set', 'dimension1', match[0]); 
  }
})

This would send a value of country:united_kingdom or country:spain as the value of dimension1. This assumes the country name after country: is just letters, numbers and _ characters. I don't know exactly how your tags are structured, so I can't say it'll 100% work. But this should get your started.

Is there a way to view data/filter data by user organization?