Robert Desprez Communications

FIVE WEB ANALYTICS METRICS FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

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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?
  1. 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

MY PRESENTATION AT THE UPCOMING WRITERSUA CONFERENCE

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I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to attending—and presenting—at the upcom­ing Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ence in south­ern Los Ange­les on March 13–16th.

I’m deliv­er­ing a ses­sion called “Using Web Ana­lyt­ics for Improv­ing Con­tent” in which I’ll be talk­ing about why tech­ni­cal writ­ers should care about web ana­lyt­ics, key web site met­rics that writ­ers can mon­i­tor, and how to set up web ana­lyt­ics for a web site or an online help system.
I’m equal­ly excit­ed about some of the oth­er ses­sions that are sched­uled. Here are a few:

  • Com­par­ing the strengths and weak­ness­es of Help Author­ing Tools. This com­par­i­son includes Author-it, Doc-to-Help, Flare, Robo­Help, and Web­Works ePub­lish­er. Most of my career I’ve used Web­Works or Robo­Help so I’m def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ed in see­ing how the oth­er tools mea­sure up.
  • Lever­ag­ing user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent in tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. If you’ve been mon­i­tor­ing my blog over the last two months, I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of entries about social media and tech­ni­cal documentation.
  • Tak­ing advan­tage of HTML5. Par­tic­u­lar­ly I’d like to know if there’s any­thing I can do to incor­po­rate this tech­nol­o­gy into tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion deliverables.
  • Writ­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for mobile devices. This includes devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Of course, there are many oth­er top­ics, includ­ing a lot of ses­sions on writ­ing, DITA, and oth­er technologies.

WEB ANALYTICS FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS

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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

 

WEB ANALYTICS FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS

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Tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments his­tor­i­cal­ly have had lit­tle idea how their deliv­er­ables were used, if at all.

More often than not, depart­ments assid­u­ous­ly worked to make sure that the con­tent was tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, that the deliv­er­ables adhered to the com­pa­ny style guide, and that the items were shipped before or on the agreed-upon deadlines.

After suc­cess­ful­ly ship­ping, mean­ing­ful feed­back was hard­ly a del­uge. More real­is­ti­cal­ly, it was a trickle—some anec­do­tal feed­back that a user liked it, or an e‑mail that the sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive thought it hit the mark. Talk about walk­ing through the fog.

Web ana­lyt­ics soft­ware changes that dynam­ic. By adding a few lines of code to an intranet site, a help sys­tem that is host­ed on a web serv­er, or a sup­port web site, you can quickly:

  • Dis­cern about how many peo­ple are view­ing a cer­tain web page (such as a trou­bleshoot­ing item) for a peri­od of time.
  • Dis­cov­er how long users spend on a web page.
  • Learn where the cus­tomer is phys­i­cal­ly locat­ed (that is, the coun­try they live in).
  • Under­stand the pop­u­lar­i­ty of dif­fer­ent deliv­er­ables, such as PDF files.

All of this data pro­vides tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors with insights into how con­tent is used, and ideas of where to direct your efforts.

Here’s one real-life exam­ple. My soft­ware team learned that users didn’t under­stand one facet of the soft­ware. Respond­ing to that need, we cre­at­ed the doc­u­ment, local­ized it into sev­en lan­guages, and mon­i­tored its pop­u­lar­i­ty when it was post­ed to our sup­port web site. Our users appeared to like it—using web ana­lyt­ics we could con­firm that it was one of the most accessed doc­u­ments for months.

We may not get to phys­i­cal­ly vis­it users as much as we’d like. But web ana­lyt­ics at least gives us some sem­blance of how doc­u­ments are used.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290