Drive your Docs with Data - Conduit Conference 2017

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I encourage you to ask questions along the way.

I can’t show you anything proprietary, so I’m showing this through the lens of social media and easily accessible public sites. Hopefully you can translate that to your business, whether you own a business, you’re in freelance, or an employee.

Let’s start out with the basics of how to acquire data

If you send out your documentation via PDF, and you happen to have it available for public download, you have exactly one statistic: the number of downloads. That’s not helpful to you, and not helpful to management.

This is the reason you should move your documentation online instead of PDF or CHM. This is also a selling point with management if you haven’t moved yet

The two popular ones I’ve seen are Webalizer and AWStats. AWStats is the nicer one to look at and use.

They are pretty basic, and they are not pretty, but they are free stats. Ask your technology departments about what stat packages are available.

Downsides? Not sortable, not exportable other than copypasta

Everyone always wants to add more more more content, but no one ever takes the time to remove the clutter. Big numbers of topics look great to management, but not to users.

if you’re fortunate enough to have public-facing content, or if your company uses GA internally, welcome to nirvana. i have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible.

This should work in any HTML-based help system, though be sure that your company allows outside connections to google to “phone home”. It is probably not a good idea to implement this if you’re delivering html-based help to customers, as their IT staff may not like that you’re sending their company’s user data to google.

This also shows that I’m not going to retire on my AdSense revenue.

If you or your company have a blog, or you’re thinking about starting a blog, then this could give you some ideas

If your company uses WordPress, and you can get admin access, there are stats available both through the dashboard and through wordpress.com. I think you need to JetPack plugin, which is free from WordPress.

If your company has a twitter presence, this may be a way to address pain points with doc. This will be helpful if you own a business – helps you respond to the market. Go where your customers are!

I mention Facebook not because it’s necessarily some place you can find data about your customers, but to let you know the possibilities and maybe bring some ideas back to your teams for better metrics. These may also be things your marketing dept (Blech!) has access to – can your content add value?

If you’re a contractor/freelancer or own your own business, then you really should have a presence on Facebook, and these stats may be more relevant to you.

There’s a Chrome extension called Data Selfie what information FB has on you. Facebook knows things like your religious preferences, your political orientation, your intelligence and life satisfaction percentiles, how long you spent on friends’ posts. But it also thinks there’s a 62% chance I’m female.

I saw that a lot of the traffic to edmarsh.com was coming from FB, so I created a page to see if I could generate more traffic.

After a few beers, and *Purely* in the interest of research, I decided to spend five bucks and see what Facebook ads would do.

Gave me twice the engagement, no real actionable results, but a ton of data. This is where FB is getting it right.

The people that liked the post after the ad was posted were not at all who I expected. None of them were content people. Not a one.

This is a gold mine if you’re not already looking at these.

Reach out to the users and support if you can. Follow up on an interesting ticket – ask for clarification, if they think it’d be a good topic. I’ve created topics solely from tickets. But be patient – this probably won’t be people’s priority.

In our field, the Volcker rule is a popular topic. But, it’s not easy to spell Volcker. We found a ticket that left out the letter C and therefore didn’t get any search results. As a result, we added hidden keywords so

If you need ideas for promotion, this is great. Your marketing team may like you for using this as well.

This is at the bottom of every google search page.

The last thing we’ll talk about is what to do with all this information. What tools do you use to help you analyze all this data? Really, there’s only one desktop tool that will let you meaningfully slice and dice it – and that’s excel.

Sorting, filtering

This is going to sound odd, because it sounded odd to me when I heard it at Lavacon a few years ago, but I love content inventories. Incidentally, management loves seeing this kind of stuff, too.

These are particularly helpful when working with new teams, or fi they want to move their content to your system. Give them this and let them have at it! I’ve also had teams very appreciative that I did it for them.

If you want to be amazed, sit down with a financial person and watch what they can do with Excel.

Drive your Docs with Data - Conduit Conference 2017

Ed Marsh

Drive your Docs with Data - Conduit Conference 2017