4 Benefits of Product Documentation Analytics According to Our Customers

Your product documentation isn’t just a repository of information, it’s a goldmine of user behavior data waiting to be discovered. Every search query, page view, and user interaction reveal critical insights about your customers’ needs, pain points, and success patterns. Yet most organizations leave this valuable intelligence untapped, missing opportunities to transform their documentation from a cost center into a strategic business asset.

Generic web analytics tools like Google Analytics can tell you how many people visited your documentation, but they can’t tell you whether those visitors found what they needed or left frustrated. Traditional metrics like page views and bounce rates fail to capture the nuanced reality of how users interact with technical content.

This is where Fluid Topics makes the difference. By focusing on content-specific metrics rather than general web traffic, we enable teams to continuously refine and improve their content for better business results. This kind of data-driven approach is crucial to optimizing content operations, especially since companies that embrace data-informed decision making report a 63% increase in operational productivity.

Fluid Topics tracks both quantitative and qualitative data, including:

• Who your users are
• How users search for information
• How users engage with your content
• How your users feel about the quality and helpfulness of that documentation

These insights enable organizations to move beyond guesswork and create documentation experiences that genuinely support their users’ success and their own business objectives.

In this article, we’ll highlight the benefits of Fluid Topics Analytics and 4 ways our clients have used product analytics to improve their documentation.

The Advantages of Fluid Topics Analytics

Our analytics services are purpose-built for our platform, no custom integrations required. Our real-time metrics deliver comprehensive visibility into user behavior within your knowledge ecosystem, from initial search intent to final content consumption, enabling confident, data-driven decisions. Our customers gain a wide range of benefits by tapping into these powerful metrics:

• Enhancing employee productivity: Documentation metrics clarify user needs so teams can prioritize high-value content updates.
• Improving customer self-service: Helpful content empowers customers to find information autonomously, and documentation metrics provide first-hand user feedback to refine content and ensure users find what they need.
• Optimizing costs: Product knowledge teams use content analytics to identify process improvements and optimize resource allocation. This streamlines operations, reducing indirect costs.
• Identifying knowledge gaps: Analytics highlight knowledge gaps, out-of-date content, and missing synonyms or topics.
• Future-proofing their strategies: Tracking the use of AI applications and chatbots enables companies to prioritize the type of tools they provide to their customers based on their specific needs.

4 Ways Clients Use Documentation Analytics to Improve Content

1. Optimize Information Findability for End Users

Any business wants their users to be able to find what they need quickly and easily. This plays a major role in delivering a positive user experience as professionals report spending 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it. And if internal employees can’t find the documentation they need, then how can we expect external customers to access key knowledge?

Fluid Topics customers look at popular search terms, saved searches, traffic sources, and bookmarks to understand their users’ thought processes. You need to know how people search for information and how many documents they go through to find their answers to improve findability. From there, teams can add synonyms in vocabularies, create or adjust content metadata, and encourage the use of saved searches and personal books to facilitate improved findability.

By updating content based on user experience metrics, our customers have enhanced their product knowledge findability. Vaisala Head of Applied Digital Innovation (Former Commercial Product Information Manager), Katy Greatrex, spoke to these results, stating “we have seen great improvement in content findability.” She explained that one of their updates was adding links on the main corporate site that led to pre-filtered searches on the portal.

For improving findability, we also recommend making an early, foundational investment in metadata. Start pragmatically, then continuously refine and expand your metadata as you gain a deeper understanding of user needs, business goals, and use cases. This ensures the right information reaches the right user at the right time whether through contextual cues or user profiles. This is what KONE, multinational engineering company and global leader in elevators, escalators, and automatic doors, did to improve information findability and search result accuracy.

2. Identify and Fill Gaps in Documentation

With hundreds or even thousands of pages of documentation, it can be nearly impossible to determine what information is missing without direct user feedback. Yet, with 18% of workers reporting they are completely unable to find essential information for their role every day, it’s clear that a knowledge gap exists.

Our customers leverage the ‘Searches with no results’ dashboard to identify missing information that needs to be created. This works together with the most searched terms, user journeys, and time spent on topics or documents to help teams identify critical content gaps quickly and effectively.

Fluid Topics customer Hexagon, global leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions, used our analytics tool to better understand their content gaps, improve accuracy, and prioritize updates. Lonnye Yancey-Smith explained this stating, “Those analytics provide great insights that we can use to directly improve the quality of our doc—insights that web analytics alone can’t provide.”

3. Provide Quick Access to High-Value Documents

To optimize the user experience, companies may want to highlight frequently visited documentation — think guides to get started with a product. Rather than making users search for crucial information, proactively providing it ensures a seamless content experience.

Teams need to identify the most popular documents and topics to know which information to spotlight. Metrics like document views, topics views, document ratings, topic ratings, and content usage can help. The results highlight priority content, which administrators can feature on the portal homepage or create links to personalized search pages with preset filters tailored to specific user groups.

Cloud Database Management System, Teradata, uses these documentation analytics to optimize content operations. Technical Project Manager for Content Operations, Beth McFadden explained that “these new content analytics have helped to challenge long-standing beliefs about how content was used. Now, the team can easily understand what users have searched for and for how long or if, for example, there are topics that have never been visited. We use these insights to drive our documentation effort.”

Another way to provide instant knowledge access is by allowing users to create personal books, build their own collections, or create search alerts for live content updates. Vaisala’s sales team took full advantage of this feature to accelerate tender responses. Titta Majala, Documentation Manager, pointed out this use case stating, “Our team must create a tender response in a short time frame. With the documentation portal, they are sure to find the most up-to-date content. They can build their own collections of documents or create bookmarks for instant access to their most important documents.« 

4. Boost Documentation Visibility and SEO Results

Users should be able to find product content from public documentation portals with a basic Google search. However, most documentation isn’t indexed or optimized for SEO efforts. Therefore, it’s difficult if not impossible to access this information from public search engines. After applying SEO best practices, documentation teams can use metrics like traffic source type, document views, and topic views to assess their visibility.

Fluid Topics’ traffic source analytics answer key questions:

• How many users are driven to the portal through organic traffic?
• To what extent do your SEO efforts effectively highlight relevant documents and topics?
• Which specific documents or topics are boosted by your efforts?

In parallel, search terms analytics provide insights into users’ search habits, needs, and term usage which teams can use to optimize documents for SEO keywords. Our customers that have put these strategies to the test have seen significant results. Beth McFadden reported that “Teradata’s technical documentation website is now the company’s most visited website with over 5 million visits in the last year alone.” In parallel, Hexagon took their documentation portal public and grew their site users by 64% with 42% of traffic coming from web searches.

Coming Soon: Insights from AI Tools

Fluid Topics offers out-of-the-box AI integrations that customers can implement into their knowledge bases or customer portals. There are three main types of AI tools available: chatbots, translators, and completion widgets (i.e., summary generators, code explainers, and tools and parts extractors). In the coming months*, customers will be able to dig deeper into user trends and patterns with new, detailed AI metrics.

*Note: Our AI documentation analytics are constantly evolving, so check back for updates on the latest metrics and how our customers are taking advantage of these insights.

How Product Documentation Analytics Prove Self-Service Value

Well-organized, accessible documentation enables users to self-serve and find solutions autonomously. The appeal of self-service is undeniable; 60% of customers prefer using self-service tools for simple issues rather than speaking with live representatives. This preference creates a significant opportunity for organizations to reduce support costs while improving customer satisfaction.

Product documentation analytics enable organizations to track case deflection through multiple approaches. One effective method measures deflection at the ticket creation stage, when users begin to create a support request, the system presents relevant documentation based on their query. If users access this content and abandon their ticket submission, the case is considered deflected.

The impact is significant. An average of 23% of cases are deflected in the technology industry. Human Resources Management Software, Darwinbox, achieved even higher results with Fluid Topics. They reported a 65% case deflection rate after launching their own chatbot. Their system intelligently pulls the most relevant and up-to-date articles in response to user queries.

With technical support tickets costing companies around $100 each to resolve, these deflection rates translate into substantial savings at scale. For example, organizations handling hundreds or thousands of tickets a month can achieve massive cost savings thanks to a small improvement in their deflection rates.

Conclusion

Your content holds a trove of valuable information, and documentation metrics help you unlock and take advantage of the potential insights. By understanding how end users find and interact with documentation, our customers can prioritize their roadmaps and content updates. With documentation metrics and user needs at the heart of their documentation strategies, they guarantee relevant, easy-to-find, and accurate product knowledge.