Guide analytics and observability

Knock provides comprehensive analytics and observability features for guides, enabling you to track user engagement, monitor guide performance, and understand how your in-product messaging is performing across your application.

Each guide page includes an analytics summary that highlights key metrics over the last N days, based on your account's retention period. These metrics are based on the engagement events tracked for the guide.

The key metrics available include:

• Audience. The total number of users in the target audience for this guide.
• Seen. The number of users for whom this guide is marked as seen.
• Interacted. The number of users who interacted with this guide.
• Archived. The number of users who archived or dismissed this guide.

Guide analytics measure user interaction based on message status. You'll interact with a set of engagement status options to track user interaction. When using Knock's pre-built components, these message status events will be handled automatically, but you also have the option to map these statuses to your own internal meanings to make your guides analytics useful for your team.

The available engagement tracking options for guides include:

• Seen. The guide was rendered and visible to the user.
• Interacted. The user took an action within the guide (clicked a button, link, etc.).
• Archived. The user dismissed or archived the guide. This action removes the guide from eligibility for that user.

These statuses help you understand the effectiveness of your guides and identify opportunities for optimization.

You can view guide analytics directly in the Knock dashboard:

1. Navigate to Guides in your environment.
2. Select the guide you want to review.
3. View the analytics summary on the guide's Overview tab, or open the Activity tab to see its events as they happen.

You can also view analytics across all guides in the Observability > Analytics section, where you can filter and group by guide key to compare performance across different guides.

Knock doesn't offer a metrics API for guides. The guides API returns the guides a user is eligible to see, along with that user's engagement state for each step. It doesn't return totals across users.

To read guide engagement in your own code, list your guide channel's messages with the messages API. Filter by channel_id and engagement_status. Fetch a single message's events with the list message events endpoint. To send guide events to an analytics tool or data warehouse, see data export.

The Activity tab lists the guide's message events as they happen, newest first. For example, it shows each time a user sees, reads, interacts with, or archives the guide. Each row shows the event type, the recipient, and when the event happened. The tab isn't available in branch environments.

New events appear at the top of the list as users engage with the guide. The list pauses when you select an event or go to another page of the list, so rows stay in place while you read. Use the controls next to Filter to pause streaming, refresh the list once, or start streaming again from the newest events.

Select Filter to narrow the list by recipient, event type, tenant, or date. The list starts with the last 7 days of events. It can go back as far as your account's data retention period, up to 90 days.

Select an event to view its recipient, message ID, tenant, guide, and environment. Below those, a timeline shows every event on that message. An interacted event in the timeline includes any metadata your application passed with the interaction. Select View message to open the message detail view.

You can access message details for guides through the Messages tab of each guide in the Knock dashboard, or via Observability > Messages. In the messages table, you can identify:

• Engagement status. Current engagement state (seen, archived, etc.) per recipient.
• Recipient information. Which users received the guide and when.
• Message timeline. Creation and engagement timestamps for each guide message.

Guide message events are included in Knock's available integrations with analytics platforms, enabling you to track guide engagement alongside your other product data.

Customers using data warehouse sync, can also access guide analytics data in the exported messages table. Guides messages can be identified by the presence of a guide_id and guide_key, which allows you to filter and analyze guide-specific message data in your data warehouse.