Identify content gaps

This is for:

Business Analyst System Administrator

In Coveo Usage Analytics (Coveo UA), a content gap is defined as content that’s either missing or unsearchable, which can cause queries and keywords entered by users to yield no results, no clicks, too many clicks, or poor ranking of clicked content.

With the required privileges, you can analyze these occurrences to identify which queries don’t return relevant results and from there, pinpoint potential content gaps. Knowing which topics people are most searching for also helps to prioritize content creation.

To identify content gaps

Use one of the following methods:

  • Look at the Content Gaps explorer:

    1. Access the Coveo Administration Console Reports (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and then, in the Name column, click Content Gaps.

    2. Investigate why each user query or keyword with the highest Search Event Count value didn’t return results.

      Note

      The step of sorting through user queries or keywords with the highest Search Event Count value should be performed several times over a timeframe of a few days. This ensures that all occurrences and day-to-day changes are captured. The high Search Event Count value may have little to no results for different reasons:

      • The search may have been performed by the same user multiple times, wherein they entered a misspelled keyword repeatedly.

      • The search may have been performed by a bot.

  • Look at Queries Without Results:

    1. Access the Coveo Administration Console Reports (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and then, in the Name column, click Summary.

    2. In the Content Gaps tab, look at the content of the Queries Without Results (Visits) list to identify the most searched topics on which you should focus to improve content availability.

      Tip

      The benchmark for the percentage of queries without results is 5% or less.

  • Look at the Search Event Clickthrough metric:

    1. Access the Coveo Administration Console Reports (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and then, in the Name column, click Search Relevance.

      By default, the Search Event Clickthrough (%) metric is in the data table.

    2. Sort the table with descending Search Event Count metric values.

    3. Look at the top user queries with lowest Search Event Clickthrough (%) values to highlight topics for which there’s potentially little or no content accessed by search interface users.

      • Typically, queries displaying optimal results have a Search Event Clickthrough (%) ratio above 60%. Values under 40% should be investigated, particularly those with higher search event counts (users are frequently searching using this query, but aren’t clicking anything).

      • Adding the Unique client ID or the Unique visitor ID metric to the report can be helpful to determine whether the results were biased by one or two users with abnormal activity (for example, same user submitting the same query many times).

      • Consider taking action when queries with Search Event Clickthrough (%) ratios are below 40% (for example, create new content, fine-tune the ranking factors, etc.).

Required privileges

The following table indicates the privileges required for members to view elements of the Reports (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and associated panels (see Manage privileges and Privilege reference).

Note

Access to dashboards or part of their content may be further restricted as a function of the member (see Manage access to reports and Manage permission filters).
Action Service - Domain Required access level

View usage analytics reports

Analytics - Reports

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What’s next?

Now that you have identified your content gaps, you can start investigating their causes.