Reporting on tags: why the numbers surprise you

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Professional or higher, Support Professional or higher
Access Admin

Explore can report on tags, with two behaviours that make the numbers wrong if you do not know about them.

Build the report

  1. Open Explore and create a report on a ticket dataset.
  2. Add a metric counting tickets.
  3. Add the tag attribute as a row.
  4. Filter to the tags you care about, rather than showing all of them.

The two behaviours

A ticket with three tags counts three times

Because tags are a list, not a single value. Add up a tag breakdown and the total exceeds your ticket count. That is correct behaviour and a wrong conclusion if you read it as a share of tickets.

Where you need percentages, filter to one set of mutually exclusive tags, or use a field instead.

Unfiltered means everything

A report on all tags shows every tag your account has ever used, including typos and abandoned schemes. Always filter to the ones you are asking about.

Why a field is usually better

A drop-down field holds one value per ticket, so the numbers add up and the list is fixed. Anything you report on regularly should be a field, with tags reserved for marking that something happened.

If a tag report is important enough to be on a dashboard, that is the signal to make it a field.

What tags do report well

Yes-or-no questions. How many tickets were escalated, how many got a reminder, how many came through a particular route. Those are exactly what tags are for.

See also

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