By using Google Ana­lyt­ics tech­ni­cal writ­ers can dis­cov­er what con­tent they write is pop­u­lar, how long users read their con­tent, and where their cus­tomers live. This blog post is a sum­ma­ry of the main points I dis­cussed at my recent pre­sen­ta­tion at the Writ­er­sUA writ­ing con­fer­ence in Long Beach, California.

What is Web Analytics?

First off, web ana­lyt­ics enables tech­ni­cal writ­ers to see how users access your intranet, sup­port web sites, and even help sys­tems that are host­ed on a web serv­er. Some writ­ers that I’ve talked to seem to think that web ana­lyt­ics is com­pli­cat­ed to set up and use. Actu­al­ly, set­ting it up is pret­ty sim­ple, assum­ing you’re com­fort­able with adding a bit of Google’s code to your HTML page. Ana­lyz­ing your data is also pret­ty sim­ple for our purposes.

Why It’s Important for Technical Writers

I believe web ana­lyt­ics is impor­tant for two reasons.

First, it pro­vides insights into how your users are find­ing your site, how they explored it, and how tech­ni­cal writ­ers can enhance their expe­ri­ence. Most of us work in orga­ni­za­tions where there are lim­it­ed resources and a large of queue of work. With web ana­lyt­ics, you can quick­ly dis­cov­er the num­ber of peo­ple review­ing your con­tent for a giv­en peri­od (month­ly, quar­ter­ly, or even dai­ly), and which doc­u­ments are pop­u­lar and which doc­u­ments are large­ly ignored.

Sec­ond, with web ana­lyt­ics, I think that it’s quite pos­si­ble that our writ­ing will be monitored—even scrutinized—in cer­tain orga­ni­za­tions that are inter­est­ed in see­ing the effec­tive­ness of each doc­u­ment and sup­port top­ic we write.

Tris­tan Bish­op, a blog­ger and senior con­tent strate­gist, wrote about the use of web ana­lyt­ics and how it will change our jobs:
“It won’t be long before you’ll know which of your top­ics are mak­ing a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence, which need some help and which can sim­ply dis­ap­pear. It will soon be painful­ly obvi­ous which team mem­bers are writ­ing the high-impact top­ics, which are writ­ing the unin­tel­li­gi­ble top­ics and which are writ­ing the irrel­e­vant top­ics.” Ouch.

What Can You Measure

For a free tech­nol­o­gy, it’s amaz­ing what you can dis­cov­er using Google Ana­lyt­ics. You can mon­i­tor the num­ber of vis­i­tors com­ing to your site or help sys­tem for a spec­i­fied peri­od, the num­ber of new vis­i­tors ver­sus return­ing vis­i­tors, the aver­age length of time users spend on your site, the key­words they use in a search field, the coun­try they live in, the brows­er they use to access your con­tent, and much more. In fact, if you’re inter­est­ed, you can keep tabs on dozens of met­rics. But for tech­ni­cal writ­ers, I think there are just a hand­ful of met­rics you might want to keep an eye on.

1. Over­all traf­fic vol­umes. This is impor­tant because it gives you a sense how many peo­ple are read­ing the con­tent you write and sup­port. You can start per­form­ing com­par­isons of this month’s traf­fic ver­sus the pre­vi­ous month’s traf­fic. Are num­bers going up? How is it relat­ed to sup­port calls?
2. Vis­it dura­tion. In gen­er­al, the longer a per­son spends on your site, the more like­ly he or she will return. In con­trast, if a per­son stays only a few sec­onds, you may deduce that there is noth­ing of val­ue to the user.
3. Bounce rates. Strict­ly speak­ing, a bounce occurs when a vis­i­tor looks at just one page of your help or web site and then leaves the site quick­ly. If a vis­i­tor comes to your intranet or sup­port site and then imme­di­ate­ly clicks the Back but­ton, it’s con­sid­ered a bounce. If your bounce rate is high (expressed as a per­cent­age such as 50 per­cent), you may be draw­ing the wrong type of per­son to your intranet/site.
4. Search key­words. Using ana­lyt­ics, you can track the most com­mon key­words that users search for while using your sup­port web site or help sys­tem, pro­vid­ing insight into the con­tent that cus­tomers want. So this may help you understand:

• What are cus­tomers look­ing for and strug­gling with?
• What are the most com­mon phras­es when peo­ple are searching?
• As a writer, do you need to change the way you describe a pro­ce­dure or con­cept so it’s more in line with the way cus­tomers think of it?

5. Top pages and con­tent. Know­ing what vis­i­tors are seek­ing out can help you tai­lor con­tent for them and help you prune the con­tent that isn’t being used. This may help you focus your efforts when it comes to under­stand­ing the best way to spend your time.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Google has done a good job of explain­ing how to set up web ana­lyt­ics on your web site or online help. For more infor­ma­tion, see http://www.google.com/analytics/discover_analytics.html

Oth­er resources worth reviewing:

Web Ana­lyt­ics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik
Kaushik’s blog: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
Web Ana­lyt­ics Demys­ti­fied by Eric T Peterson
Author Anne Gentle’s blog entry on web ana­lyt­ics:
http://justwriteclick.com/2010/09/01/web-analytics-for-technical-documentation-sites/
Google Ana­lyt­ics by Jer­ri L. Ledford