Sometimes certain content is only suitable for a subset of customers or visitors on your Help Center. With the ability to have private articles, and use audience targeting, it’s easy to show only relevant articles, while hiding other content.
This allows you to protect sensitive information from your competitors, offer tailored advice and provide all your users and leads with a clean and simple Help Center experience.
You can share private articles with your users through the Messenger home, share them in the Inbox, or include them in Custom Answers or Workflows.
Make a public article private
If an article is published in a collection, it’s visible to everyone by default. To keep an article private (i.e. not available in your public Help Center) but still shareable via a direct link, simply publish the article without adding it a collection.
This will generate the unique article URL which you can share with customers directly in the Inbox or hyperlink from other pages. However, it will not be searchable in your Help Center or indexed by search engines.
This is also a great way to preview an article in your Help Center without making it publicly available.
Target a public article to a specific audience
You can set up audience targeting and define exactly who should be able to view an article, by adding filters in the right sidebar of the article under the "Audience" section.
Start by choosing if the article should be visible to Leads, Users, Visitors, or a combination of the three:
To keep an article hidden from anyone not logged in to your product, just select Users here, and that's it. 👍
Next, click the plus sign + to define a more specific audience, then choose the attributes you’d like to filter on. As an example, if this article is only relevant to users on your ‘Pro’ plan, you could add a rule where target audience is Users and Plan is 'Pro.
Or, if this article is for admins of your workspace versus end users, you could add a rule where target audience is Users and User Type is 'Admin'.
To create audience targeting filters you must:
Have a custom domain and cookie forwarding set up.
Set up custom data attributes to target different users.
Provide a login link specified in your Help Center settings under Privacy.
Article must be part of a Help Center that meets above outlined requirements.
After defining your filters, you should see a green banner at the top of the article indicating the changes you've made.
If you define a specific audience for an article:
Smart Suggestions won’t suggest it to people who don’t match your filters.
It won’t be listed by search engines like Google.
Only people in the audience will see it when searching your Help Center. - Including those who search it in the Messenger.
Teammates will see a "🔒[Restricted]” warning before inserting it into messages, Custom Answers, Workflows or the Messenger.
Teammates can’t send it to people who don't match the audience filters in Inbox.
Tip for sharing internal docs with your team: You can set the audience filter to target internal teammates only.
As an example, you could set the audience filter for the Article to be:
"Email address contains @yourcompanyname" or
"Company name is ___".
FAQs
What does it look like in the Help Center?
What does it look like in the Help Center?
If an article is only visible to logged in users, anyone who visits it while logged out will be shown a link to your website's login page:
If the article has a more targeted audience (i.e not all logged in users) people who aren’t in the audience won’t be shown a login link, but will still have the option to search your Help Center:
Can I edit the audience targeting for a collection?
Can I edit the audience targeting for a collection?
No it's not possible to edit the audience for a collection and is not planned for the near future. You must edit the audience for each individual article. You can upvote, comment and subscribe to this feature request in our Product Wishlist.
Can I edit the audience targeting rules for articles in bulk?
Can I edit the audience targeting rules for articles in bulk?
No, it's only possible to set the audience targeting in bulk for Fin. To change the audience targeting for who can view the articles in your Help Center, you must edit each article's audience individually.
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