This page explains how to measure the success of your documentation with quantitative metrics, qualitative feedback, and alignment with business goals.
Quantitative metrics
Track these metrics to understand documentation performance:
- Page views: High traffic indicates popular content, but context matters. Many views on error pages may signal product issues rather than documentation success.
- Time on page: Can indicate engagement or confusion. Compare with user feedback to understand the difference.
- Bounce rate: High bounce rates may mean users found answers quickly or couldn’t find what they needed. Use qualitative feedback to interpret this metric accurately.
Compare metrics over time against baselines to identify trends and understand whether users achieve their goals.
Correlate traffic and satisfaction
Use analytics to identify patterns:
- High traffic and low feedback scores: Popular pages with a poor user experience. Prioritize improving these pages.
- Low traffic and high feedback scores: Documentation that is working well, but might not be discoverable. Consider promoting these pages.
- High traffic and high feedback scores: Your documentation’s greatest hits. Review these pages for ideas to improve the rest of your content.
Qualitative feedback
Add context to your quantitative metrics with qualitative information:
- User feedback: Use feedback to capture user sentiment through ratings and open-ended comments, helping you understand what works and where users struggle.
- Stakeholder input: Get regular feedback from teams like support, engineering, and customer success to uncover common issues users face and areas for improvement.
- User testing: Conduct usability tests to validate whether users can find the answers they need and whether your documentation aligns with their expectations. See Understand your audience for more on user research.
Business alignment
Measure documentation against broader business objectives:
- Support efficiency: Track whether your documentation reduces the volume of support tickets or improves satisfaction scores, indicating it’s meeting user needs.
- Onboarding and adoption: Monitor how well documentation supports new users in getting up to speed, contributing to faster product adoption.
- Retention: Well-maintained, easy-to-follow docs contribute to positive user experiences, helping to reduce churn and improve retention rates.
Put analytics into action
Use these patterns to prioritize your documentation improvements:
- Fix high-impact problems first: Popular pages with poor feedback scores affect the most users.
- Respond to user feedback: Contextual and code snippet feedback can identify specific areas for improvement.
- Focus on key user journeys: Prioritize pages connected to the most important tasks for your product.
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