A help system is only as good as your users can find the information they are looking for. To measure the effectiveness of your WebHelp system and improve it where necessary, it makes sense to track usage so that you can see what your users are searching for and finding.
Help+Manual Professional and Floating have integrated support for Google Analytics to accomplish this goal in a few easy steps. (Please note that this feature is not available in the Basic version of Help+Manual.)
See this topic for instructions on setting up your WebHelp for profiling with Google Analytics.
Important: Use Google Analytics 4 — Universal Analytics is being closed down
Note that the older Universal Analytics from Google with the UA-xxxxxxx-x tracking IDs is now deprecated and is going to be completely closed down at the end of June 2023. Help+Manual 9 and Premium Pack 5 both have full support for the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with the new G-xxxxxxxxxx ID format, and you should switch to it immediately. Among other things, in the default configuration, Google claims that it is now compliant with the European Union's GDPR legislation. This is disputed by some parties, but it is definitely more compliant than Universal Analytics.
Available information
By integrating Google Analytics, you can track how the content of your WebHelp system is used and measure its effectiveness. Tracking includes:
General usage
How many visitors are viewing your help? How long are they reading your topics? Which topics are they reading? Google Analytics delivers detailed statistics on the number of visitors, page views, viewing time, visitor origin and referring pages.
Topics viewed and viewing paths
Learn which help topics are viewed more frequently and which ones are less popular. Viewing paths tell you, how your users are navigating through your help system and what they are reading next.
Entry pages and links to external pages
See the most popular entry pages, where users arrive in your WebHelp system. Find out, where they go when they click on links to other sites.
Full-text search and index terms
What terms are your users searching for? Which results did they follow? Which search terms are missing? In addition to full-text search terms, Help+Manual's integrated GA solution also reports use of the keyword index and lists the most popular keywords.
External links
External links are links in your WebHelp system that lead the user away from your site. Clicks on external links as well as file downloads are tracked separately as events in Google Analytics.
See also:
Preparing your WebHelp project for Google Analytics
Full Text Search (Configuration Options)
