Measuring SuccessHow to Make Data-Driven Decisions in Content Development

Casey Starnes, Lead Information Developer

#SeizeTheData

What You’ll Learn

– How to use an analytics platform to gain insight into your content

– How to build your own analytics platform

– How to implement a model of making data-driven decisions

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You publish a new version of the documentation

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“Who is reading the doc and what are they reading?”Senior Manager

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Build Reports

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Google Analytics Reports

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2.0.x

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Where We Started

Most Read Versions

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Where We Started

• Static

• Google Analytics Web UI is limited

• Manual process

• We wanted to create custom reports

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How do we create our own analytics platform?

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#SeizeTheData

We Explored Our Options

Option 1

– Turn key solution

– All of the upgrades

– All the features we wanted and more

– The “perfect solution”

– Very expensive

Option 2

– Turn key solution

– At its core it had what we needed

– Couldn’t host via a web server

– Lacked beautiful visualizations and customization

– Expensive

Option 3

– Required a lot customization and coding

– But it had the best of the first two

– Great custom visualizations

– Required a lot of maintenance

– Open source

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#SeizeTheData

We Explored Our Options

Option 1

– Turn key solution

– All of the upgrades

– All the features we wanted and more

– The “perfect solution”

– Very expensive

Option 2

– Turn key solution

– At its core it had what we needed

– Couldn’t host via a web server

– Lacked beautiful visualizations and customization

– Expensive

Option 3

– Required a lot customization and coding

– But it had the best of the first two

– Great custom visualizations

– Required a lot of maintenance

– Open source

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#SeizeTheData

We Explored Our Options

Option 1

– Turn key solution

– All of the upgrades

– All the features we wanted and more

– The “perfect solution”

– Very expensive

Option 2

– Turn key solution

– At its core it had what we needed

– Couldn’t host via a web server

– Lacked beautiful visualizations and customization

– Expensive

Option 3

– Required a lot customization and coding

– But it had the best of the first two

– Great custom visualizations

– Required a lot of maintenance

– Open source

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#SeizeTheData

We Chose Option 3

– Required a lot customization and coding

– We were comfortable writing the code

– Great custom visualizations

– Best of the three options, but required a lot of coding

– Requires some configuration after initial setup

– You still have to do some manual updates

– Open source

– This was very important because cost was a major factor

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Our Solution

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Vertica Database Shiny Dashboard Web page

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How Data Is Loaded Each Day

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Google Analytics+

Other Data Sources

User Interaction Data Vertica Database

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Every Team Member Can View the Data

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“What is the most viewed version?”

Senior Manager

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“What are the most popular community pages in the last week?”Information Developer

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“What do users think about the topics?”

Senior Manager

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Helpful Button

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“What do users search to get to a specific page?”

Information Developer

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“How are users getting to our content?”

Information Developer

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“What makes a page successful?”

Senior Manager

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How we define successful content

– Use multiple data sources to understand the topic

– Listen to all channels

– Measure the amount of feedback the topic gets

– Don’t just rely on one metric, listen to your customers

– Internal feedback from development, training, sales, etc.

– Some of the best feedback comes from your in-house teams

– Developed a methodology to score topics

– Think about all aspects of the topics: word count, images, etc.

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#SeizeTheData

Making Data-Driven Decisions

– Develop a methodology to score topics

– This should guide the decision making process

– Discover areas of improvement

– Find the holes in the data

– Use your data to prioritize the backlog

– No more guesswork organizing tasks

– Properly allocate resources for each project

– Understand the reach of the changes to topics

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#SeizeTheData

Takeaways

– Use analytics to improve your content

– Build your own analytics platform

– Empower your writers with data

– Use a model of data-driven decisions

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Thank youCasey Starnes – cstarnes@hpe.com

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Parking Lot

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Technology Stack

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Vertica Database Shiny Dashboard Web page

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https://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/https://plot.ly/

https://my.vertica.com