Numbers game

Better documentation lowers support calls, is a widely held assumption and one I’m hoping to prove in the coming months. With our new knowledge centre in place, and Google Analytics tracking how many people are visiting it, I’ll soon have stats for my side of the fence.

Early numbers (from the past two weeks) show that more people are looking at the Documentation area of our website than are looking at the Support area, but then the knowledge centre (part of the Documentation area) is new so that’s only to be expected and I’m really not expecting to get a true picture of how things are going until late January next year.

Fingers crossed.

With thanks to Rachel Potts for her post on what web analytics can do for technical communications.

Comments

  1. Don’t forget to also measure the effect this content may have on Ciboodle’s Search Engine Rankings. You may find the documentation appears higher in the listings than the marketing content. The SEO effect may be more inportant than anything else.

    If you type link:www.ciboodle.com/documentation.htm (or whatever the address is for the documentation)into Google, you should see the Web sites linking into your user documentation.

    You need to take account of the “long tail effect”. It may take a while for this to kick in.

    Also, don’t rely on just Google Analytics. You’ll get different results from other analytics tools.

  2. Unfortunately our documentation is locked behind a log in so isn’t open to the world at large.

    Yet another battle to get it unlocked, but I’m on the case!

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