Using Heap to measure engagement with Help Center & dev/API docs

  • 8 March 2022
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Hey all, I’m Heap’s docs strategist. I wanted to see if anyone else uses Heap to measure engagement with docs and share some reports I’ve found useful!

Pageviews this month compared to last month - I have a simple graph set up for pageviews over the past 30 days (I customize the range for the sake of the monthly report) grouped by entire range compared to the previous period. 

 

 

The results give me a baseline for how the docs site is doing overall - did traffic dip or spike? If so, why? After that, I group by referrer and city to look for any unusual trends. I'll also update the date range to group by day to see if there were anomalies on specific days. (I've tried other groupings in the past and haven't found anything too helpful outside of these three.)

Most-clicked items from the docs site landing page - I run this report to better understand what elements users are clicking on in our docs. It's a pretty straightforward graph of a click on any element grouped by target text. Typically, the search bar is #1, followed by the most prominent and popular docs.

 

Most downvoted/most upvoted docs - we have a "Did you find what you were looking for? / Was this doc helpful?" Survey in our docs. I have a graph set up to track clicks on those CTAs, including a Documentation Satisfaction Rate report that measures the ratio of dislikes over likes. My docs teammate @julia and I always follow up when customers tell us how we can make our docs better (and provide contact info). 

Search activity is one of the most important things to me, so I set up a snapshot to capture search terms. It is set up to court submits of the search bar grouped by the search term (snapshot). 

 

I also use Algolia to review search terms that yielded no results, which is useful for identifying and addressing any gaps in your docs experience.

I have various funnel reports set up for conversion from one docs site to the other (so the Help Center > dev docs, and vice versa), conversion from training to docs (learn.heap.io), from the marketing site, from in-app, etc. The most interesting finds are when blog posts and in-app walkthroughs are promoting docs traffic.

Last but not least, I use Google Search Console to track our performance in Google searches to improve our SEO.

Those are my main reports. Tell me how your team is using Heap for docs/Help Center data! 


3 replies

Userlevel 3
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Yes, please share with us how you track your documentation! 

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Thanks for sharing this. Do you have Google Search Console integrated to HEAP, or are you just tracking this data within Google Search Console? 

Userlevel 3
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@mstaffordHW I have Google Search Console integrated into the Help Center! 

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