On Tues­day, Nov. 16th, I’m speak­ing at the Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion West Coast chap­ter on “Web Ana­lyt­ics for Tech­ni­cal Communicators.”

Details of my talk
As tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors, we’re all in the busi­ness of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We per­form research, we ask ques­tions about the audi­ence, we draft out­lines, write and edit con­tent, and ulti­mate­ly we dis­trib­ute it.

But what’s often miss­ing is the feed­back from our users. More often than not, we don’t have a clear sense of how many peo­ple are read­ing our con­tent, what con­tent is well used, or downloaded.
Web ana­lyt­ics soft­ware can help. With free tools like Google Ana­lyt­ics, one can quick­ly dis­cov­er the most fre­quent­ly accessed doc­u­ments or web pages, where users are locat­ed (i.e. what coun­try they live in), how long they spend review­ing web pages, the num­ber of unique vis­i­tors to a sup­port site or intranet, or even which online help top­ics are viewed if your help is host­ed on a web server.

What are the ben­e­fits to attending?
Web ana­lyt­ics is free, rel­a­tive­ly easy to set up, and pro­vides insights into how staff and exter­nal cus­tomers are find­ing your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance the user experience.

When
Tues­day, Novem­ber 16, 2010
6:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for social­iz­ing and appetizers
7:00 to 9:00 p.m. for the meeting

Where
Down­town YWCA Fit­ness Build­ing, 535 Horn­by St., Van­cou­ver, BC