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- 1. Beyond Content Performance Patricia Boswell Product Educator Google, Inc.
- 2. • How do your docs perform? • Do your docs really matter? • Beyond the “BTPs” • Writing for Search
- 3. How Do Your Docs Perform? Get a content strategy
- 4. Doc Performance – Why? Have you ever had someone ask how you knew if: 1. your readers see your docs? 2. your docs really help your users?
- 5. Doc Performance – What most do 1. Install the tracking code 2. Make configurations 3. Look at the reports
- 6. Doc Performance – And Look…
- 7. Doc Performance – Do this! 1. Start with your performance plan (the answers you expect from Analytics) 2. Install the tracking code – Make configurations, if needed 3. Look at the reports – See if the signals match your expectations • How many of you do this?
- 8. Doc Performance – The Doc Plan • Installation – Big? Small? Complex or simple? Critical or merely augmenting UI? Drive Example. • Learn more – Critical to product engagement, or specialized? About Shared with Me. • Troubleshooting – Typical or unusual problem? Help users solve sharing problems.
- 9. Doc Performance: Objectives Spell out your doc goals: • Install: – Lead beginners step-by-step to installing Drive on their computer. • Learn More: – Get more users to sync their docs to Drive. • Troubleshoot: – Help fairly new users learn to share their docs.
- 10. Doc Performance: The TOC • Gateway doc • Guide all readers quickly to their chosen doc • Provide intuitive names • Avoid lots of back-and-forth
- 11. Doc Performance: BTPs Match expected signals to the “BTPs” • Bounces • Time on Page • Pageviews
- 12. Doc Performance: Bounce Rate Meaning: • 1 visit (session) == 1 pageview • Bad for ecommerce, not necessarily for content • Tip: You can use an “event” to affect your bounce rate.
- 13. Doc Performance: Time Meaning • Timestamp between Page A Page B • “Bounced” pages are excluded • Tip: You can use time with content drilldown for whole sections.
- 14. Doc Performance: Pageviews Meaning: • Includes repeated views of the same page • Can be a popularity signal, or… ? • Tip: Want to know how many visitors saw a page? Use unique pageviews.
- 15. Doc Performance: Begun • You are on your way to a content strategy • Don’t forget: it’s about trending • AND: this measures your doc performance. • But now we can answer the question “How do you know if your readers use/see your docs?”
- 16. Do Your Docs Matter? The product-to-content strategy
- 17. Do Your Docs Matter? Go beyond “measuring your docs” • Connect with your users to test assumptions – Get involved in forums/conferences – Talk to your teammates in sales/marketing – Use Surveys – “Qualitate” • Quantitative analysis is not enough.
- 18. Case Study: Campaign Tags • What is a campaign tag? – Smart link to your docs – Meant for AdWords, but useful for other things – It’s a custom referral • How does it work? – Parameters in links send data to Analytics – Traffic Sources reports show your campaigns. Example.
- 19. Case Study: Campaign Tags • How to create a campaign tag – Use our web form! – URL Builder in Analytics Help Center • Use it for document links in forums, emails, wherever you connect with customers
- 20. Campaign Tags: Insights Campaign Tagging Insights • Analytics Help Center Campaigns – Widget referrals drive doc usage – Blog referrals are big as well • My Home for Sale website – The people closest to me visited most – The real traffic didn’t come from contacts, but from “purchasing channels”
- 21. Docs that Matter: Campaign Tags • A simple way to connect with the product • Helps to validate what you already know
- 22. Beyond the BTPs Advanced Segments and Event Tracking
- 23. Advanced Segments • An X Filter (not X Factor) for website visits – X is a dimension that you can choose – You can even refine the definition of X – “How many sessions included X?” • Always remember that this is session-based (visits) • Don’t like sampling? Narrow your date range • Demo
- 24. Event Tracking • Tracking for “non-page-like” interactions • Nice for widgets (drop-downs), in-doc hyperlinks • Separate metric from pageviews • Can make it affect bounce rate or not: – Yes: When you consider a click “engagement” – No: Automated events, or home pages • Demo
- 25. Analytics Summary • Have an explicit content strategy • Match the strategy to Analytics signals • Get engaged with your product users • Then create your own campaigns • Finally: try Advanced Segments!
- 27. Writing for the Web • Fact: Web search ranking matters • Titles Matter • Initial Content Matters
- 28. Writing for Search: Ranking Why ranking matters • Major traffic drivers to Google Online Help – In product links – Web search • Users don’t click to the “next” pages • Check your Google Webmaster reports!
- 29. Writing for Search: Reports • Queries – sorted by queries • Top Pages – Same metrics, sorted by pages • Take aways: – High query position, but low search ranking? – The search engine says pages need work – High impressions, low clicks? – Your users say that pages need work
- 30. Writing for Search: Titles Matter Ranking boosters: • make titles relevant – No: “Zoom” feature name in Chrome – Yes: “Change text, images, and video sizes (zoom)” • make links canonical – No: “For details, see here.” – Yes: “For details, see Installing Drive.”
- 31. Writing for Search: Titles Matter User boosters: • Bye-bye gerund: – Make Google my home page • The <title> attribute: put all key terms so search results are stand alone – Example: Add a New Account – <title>: Add a New Account – Google Analytics Help • Make it short (Google search truncates)
- 32. Writing for Search: Title Tools • Google Insights for Search • Webmaster Tools – Keywords • Analytics – Keywords/organic report • Title search your site! – site:support.google.com/chrome + “?/hl=en”
- 33. Writing for Search: First Words • First Words Matter – Meta content used from your doc’s first words – Synonyms help! (set google vs make google my home page) Your page might have high rankings, but drive click-throughs with applicable terms
- 34. End Patricia Boswell prose@google.com Linked in: www.linkedin.com/in/prboswell Analytics: http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Editor's Notes
- I was going to talk about two features that were supposed to be released this quarter for analytics: In-Page Analytics and Content Grouping. Content grouping is really exciting for content management systems, and it’s coming out in August. If we have some time, I’m happy to talk more about these features afterwards, or to meet any of you after my chat to answer questions.
- In 2004 when I joined Google, I was asked“How do you know your docs are good?” How that bothered me so that when I had the opportunity to join GA in 2007, I did so with the hopes that I’d be “in the know.” Now obviously, it’s really important to talk to your readers and your support staff as much as possible, but when I had a chance to join GA, here’s what I did:
- I did what most Analytics users do. This is why using Analytics can be so frustrating and in fact unnerving to a lot of writers. Writers have said stuff like “Hey! My docs aren’t like Joe’s docs. You can just slap on some tracking code and apply the same metrics across the board.” And they are right. As much as we are all in this world of trying to make everything “just work,” there is no substitute for thinking and analysis.This is backwards, instead you should do just the opposite. Get a strategy, make configurations and installations to your tracking, look at the reports. Adjust your assumptions. [add this as another slide]
- And here’s what happened: I saw a lot of reports, and I wondered what it meant.
- How many of you start a writing project with a performance plan for your docs? How many of you start a writing project with a documentation plan? Guess what?
- Where the strategy begins…is not with Analytics installation! Let’s use the Drive Help Center on Analytics (support.google.com/drive used as the case study). It’s a thing to behold, right, but what does it mean? Instead of starting with installation and then looking at the reports, start with a doc plan, a natural place for you to start your strategy. By it’s very definition, a doc plan inherently bifurcates by users’ tasks, and it’s these very tasks that you can match to specific types of interactions with your documentation set using Analytics.
- Spelling out objectives includes thinking of the audience ‘funnel’ in your documentation. By the time “you” read this doc, should define the “you” there. Know thy user can help to define expected patterns of activity among your users. Usually there is at least one doc in your plan that gets your customers more engaged with your product.
- Some folks don’t even think of this as part of their doc plan; it’s just a given. The TOC is often your users’ “gateway” to your documentation set. This can be one of the most critical parts of your doc plan, even though you might not even put it down as part of the plan.
- Ok, so now that you have at least a beginning strategy, you are ready to start thinking about the performance metrics for your docs. There is a reason why the content reports have bounces, time and pageviews as the most important metrics.
- Someone note down the bounce rates for me! For the troubleshooting, and longer docs with links within the docs, you can tag links with event tracking. Discussing this a bit later.If you are also using event tracking, which I will talk about later, you need to be aware that if a user comes to a page and that page is the only one they view for the session, but you also happen to set some event tracking on that page and the user triggers that event, then the page’s visit is not considered a bounce, because there have been two interactions on that page. This can be good or not, depending on your objectives. In fact, that’s why Analytics folks made it possible for you to determine whether you want the event to count as an interaction signal or not. Use the Drive and Help Centers TOC as an example, where they were getting incorrect bounce rates for the home pages.
- Why were pageviews of Installation so low? Any ideas. I think it might be two reasons: #1 It’s mostly about offline access and how to set it up on your computer (so one experiment would be to play with the title). #2 It’s not really that critical.
- This is the part where you are looking at “documentation performance” where your documentation acts like a separate product. Here I used just three specific docs as an example, but you could do the same thing for an entire section, so for example, we could look at all the docs in the installation section and set up some objectives for that, and measure to them.
- This is the question that certainly had me freaked out. Aside from having the conversations that I could have with my readers and my team, I couldn’t say for sure how critical the documentation was to the success of a project, although intuitively I thought it was.
- Here the point is that it’s fine to see if your docs are getting used and meeting their expected signals. Before I used Analytics, my only success criteria were the connections I made with my users, and those weren’t really good. Now, I realize the value of qualitative analytics. With Analytics, I can then tie the two signals together. However, what if you could definitively say that your docs are solving users problems with the actual product itself? Case study on campaign tagging.
- This is one very simple way that you can connect the qualitative to the quantitativeAnalytics Help Center example
- It’s important to note here, that, although I was selling my house and learned that my contacts didn’t really drive the most traffic to my site, it was an important take away to see that those people that I had the most day-to-day contact with were the likely visitors to my site. This translates to the idea for me – as a writer – that connecting directly with our users is the best way to get them to visit your online content.
- New v returning take a look at this for the installation doc.Cherry picking a specific set of documents. Show them the developers site, and how I can easily see only my docs with an advanced segment. Really helpful with content management systems.
- Mention how the Online Help team has an artificially low Talk about how the drive help team used events to track certain visitor signals, like the popularity of the left nav with visitors. Are they seeing it? It’s a new feature. And how many clicks to the survey links are they getting?
- Analytics is all about finding out how visitors find your content on your website, and how they behave with that content once they are there. Webmaster Tools is another Google tool that should be a part of your content strategy, because it’ll help you learn how your content pages perform on Google Search results, and how users click through to reach your content. Why do you care? [next slide]
- The Google Online Help team did a test a couple of years back and learned that more traffic was going to other content than help centers, and their content wasn’t being used. Why? Search result rankings.
- The Google Online Help team did a test a couple of years back and learned that more traffic was going to other content than help centers, and their content wasn’t being used. Why? Search result rankings.
- The Google Online Help team did a test a couple of years back and learned that more traffic was going to other content than help centers, and their content wasn’t being used. Why? Search result rankings.
- If the body of your content is on words x, y, and z, then the title needs to match that in some significant way.
- You can use extra parameters to filter out non-english to help you better understand titles in a single language.