Google Analytics for Chat in the Web Widget

Hello! 

I am wondering what the "Chat Opened" event action means. Does this indicate that the user has engaged with the web widget (ie. tried to self-serve by asking their question using the web widget)? Or does this mean that the user has clicked the "Submit a Request"/"Live Chat" option because their self-service attempt was unsuccessful?

I am asking because we are trying to track engagement with the web widget against live chats started/offline messages submitted, to determine whether users are able to self-serve or proceed to contact us. 

Hi Eliza, thanks for your feedback! "Chat Opened" means that the user has interacted with Chat in some way, such as selecting the "live chat" contact option to open the pre-chat form or go straight to Chat. Currently, the Google Analytics events we support for the Web Widget are limited to Chat only, however we are planning to provide other events for self-service and other channel interactions in future. In the meantime, you could try looking at Support Reporting > search filtered to Web Widget to see common search terms, average number of results and click-through rate to get a sense of self-service activity.

I'd love to hear more about the events and metrics you'd like to see to track engagement and self-service.

Hi Daniel,

Is it possible to send these events to any other analytics service? We are moving away from Google Analytics to Heap Analytics for our customer behaviour tracking, so it would be great if we could surface these events in a single tool.

Hi Dylan, thanks for the feedback. This is not possible currently, however supporting pushing events to other analytics tools is something we're considering for the future.

Hi!

Is it possible to know where user click zendesk chat. I need to know in witch URL users click zendesk chat. 

For example, 50% of my users click at product page, or 30% click zendesk chat at checout. 

Hi Colvin,

You can build a custom report in Google Analytics looking at the page URL and the Chat Opened event.

-Ramin

If you require that an email be entered to submit/start a chat is there some way to understand how many people opened but then dropped off?

Confused how there can be more 'Chat Served by Operator' than 'Chat Request Form Submitted'.

For a specific date range we have:

- 481 Chat Opened

- 172 Chat Served by Operator

- 128 Chat Request Form Submitted

***Update from zendesk support adds some clarity and believe the first situation described is the one impacting us:

• Served by Operator: Number of times visitors chatted with a chat agent
• Chat Request Form Submitted: Number of times a Pre-Chat Form is submitted (if enabled)

That being said, served by operator can be higher because a visitor could chat to multiple agents in one session. This means, if a visitor requested for a chat on a new session he would be required to fill out the Pre-chat form. Once he went idle, meaning he is not on the browser where he initiated a chat and the agent disconnected and eventually the visitor comes back on the same browser without refreshing the page, he could send a message on the same session that would be assigned to a different agent. 

Another scenario would be, when a proactive trigger is enabled. This causes why Pre-chat form is override. When the proactive trigger is activated, the chat window will open up to display the automated message which your visitor could directly reply on. 

Hi Jon,

You can have more served events when using triggers, since it bypasses the pre-chat form. From your account perspective, it looks like you have multiple triggers enabled. 

Unfortunately, we don't not have granular events today for you to calculate how many people have opened the widget manually and then close it without starting a chat.

-Ramin

Hi,

On my page I have several GA properties, how can i define in which i want to save the events generated by the widget from this code?

From already thank you.

Regards! Matias

Hi 805751526 Could you elaborate? I'm not sure I've understood the question. 

Hello, is there a way to know if the widget was loaded on the page?

Hello @AAI Digital,

The best way to tell if your widget was loaded and is currently working will be to see if the script is present in the page source. If this is the case, you should see the activity of the widget in the JS console. Also, you can test calls with our widget API in the browser console as well, which I shared a document on this topic below. 

Core API

Best regards. 

Hi there,

Just wanted to post an update and let you know that we've just released enhanced event tracking within the Web Widget for Google Analytics & other analytics tools. 

We're excited to announce several new events available automatically through Google Analytics. Additionally, we’re introducing a new Javascript API that allows you to listen for these events in third-party analytics tools. With these improvements, you can now better understand your customers’ journey and behaviours when interacting with the Web Widget on your website. Understanding your customers’ needs can also guide you to refining your Web Widget implementation as a result.

Please read the public announcement or view our API docs.

Thanks,

- Miranda

Senior Product Manager, Web Widget

Hello!

I'm sorry if it's not the space to ask this but i would like to disable zendesk's hits from my google analytics. Going more deep, my GA is detecting some unexpected hits from zendesk chat widget but i dont want to get any metric and my question is: ¿is there any way to disable hits providing by zendesk chat?

thanks and have good weekend!

Hi @Tomas Hanow,

It's possible to disable all events from passing through to Google Analytics.  You can simply set analytics: false.

<script type="text/javascript">
  window.zESettings = {
    analytics: false
  };
</script>

More info here, https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables/docs/widget/settings#analytics.

- Miranda.

Something important to share based on recent experiences with this. In the "chat served by operator" event, the name of the agent is pushed as the Event Label...if you're in a position where your chat team are using real names (rather than something generic), this actually means the data being pushed is in breach of GA's terms which specifically state that no PII can be passed into the tool. If you do this, Google reserve the right to ask you to delete that data. Names are classed as PII so you'll need to anonymise.

The solution we've gone with is to deactivate the analytics plugin as per above comment from Miranda (analytics: false), and instead wire up data layer pushes that we have full control over ourselves. We then use these data layer events in GTM to pass our own GA tags, so it's very easy to pass "chatbot" if the chat is served by a bot and "agent" if the chat is served by, e.g., John Smith. Added benefit is that having these events in the data layer means you can of course push to other tools, not just GA.

Hi @Grainger, Dan,

Thanks for flagging that and sharing your solution!    

For future reference, we are planning to not send the "Chat served by operator" event by default into Google Analytics (given the PII considerations).  Customers will still be able to override this default setting by using the userEvent API at their own risk.  We have this in our backlog to address but I don't have a clear timeframe set as yet.  I'll record your details and reach out when we make progress.  I'll also post an update in this thread as well for the benefit of those following along.

Thanks,

- Miranda. 

One other point worth making in relation to compliance - again from recent experience - is that the Zendesk GA plug-in approach is non-compliant with respect to EU cookie directives. EU sites should use consent tools (OneTrust, Quantcast, home-built, etc) to actively obtain a user's cookie consent before firing tracking tags. If the Zendesk GA plug-in is used, this completely bypasses the consent mechanism and will fire the GA tracking tag regardless of whether the user has given consent or not, hence non-compliant. Same solution as before, use of the data layer pushes rather than the plug-in allows complete control over this,only firing the GA events subject to a user consenting.

There is currently some issues with this integration that I hope Zendesk is currently looking at:

1. Events are often coming through multiple times (sometimes even 5 times!) for a simple action like Web Widget open.  I have noticed this issue across many clients websites. 

2. The integration also sends custom dimensions and metrics based on your previous hit which means you can be sending irrelevant or incorrect data and polluting other GA variables

3. It sends all data as interactive events which can cause issues with Bounce rates for anything that is not user initiated 

Would be great to hear if any progress has been made.

Hi Kristi,

Thanks for your message.

1. Can you please confirm whether your website has multiple different Google Analytics trackers?  You can do so by opening the browser console (View > Developer > JavaScript Console within Chrome) and running:

ga(function() {
  console.log("Trackers: ", ga.getAll());
});

If Google Analytics is firing multiple events from a single action (like widget opened), it is most likely because the Web page is using multiple different Google Analytics trackers.  Each time we pass an event to Google Analytics, it will fire a separate event for each separate tracker on the page. So we might only fire 1 widget open event, but that may result in 5 separate events being fired by Google Analytics if there are 5 different trackers on the page. You can learn more about configuring widget events for multiple trackers here.  If that's not the case, please let us know and we'll investigate further.  

2. Do you have an example of this that you can share with us?  

3. Can you please share an example of when this is happening? 

Thanks,

- Miranda.