Web analytics tools provide an impressive volume of data. However, just because you can measure a data point doesn’t mean the data point is helpful. This blog explores how my team, the Oracle Integration user assistance team, has translated page views and visitor counts into actions and improvements.
This blog, the second in a series, explores how the Oracle Integration user assistance team uses web analytics to optimize the content that we deliver to you.
If you missed the first blog in this series, check it out here: When writers become number people.
1. Which pages are the most popular?
Knowing the most popular pages helps us make your favorite content available at your fingertips, without searching.
Most people find our content through search, but many people browse our Help Center pages. To make it easier for browsers to find helpful content, we recently added the most popular pages to our Get Started page.
2. Where are our users located?
Knowing the countries where you live and your preferred browser language helps us optimize our content for you.
In the last year, people from over 200 countries and territories visited our content. Most people are in countries where English is not the first language. However, over 80 percent of people chose English as their preferred language in their internet browser. While English might not be everyone’s first language, most people feel very comfortable using English at work.
We write for an international audience to ensure that our content is helpful for everyone. We choose words carefully, avoid abbreviations, and try to keep our sentences and paragraphs short so that it’s easier to understand.
3. What are our most popular adapters?
When we know the adapters that you use the most, we can make them available to you in more places.
We recently added links to our most popular adapters in the following places:
- Adapters page
This page is very popular, but it can be overwhelming. After all, we offer many adapters. To help you find what you need as quickly as possible, we added a Popular adapters section at the top of the page. If you’re using a common adapter, this section helps you find it without scrolling. - Get Started page
This page is even more popular than the Adapters page, so it’s an ideal place to offer a shortcut to our popular adapters. Find the top adapters and their pages in the Adapters box.
4. What size browser do most people use?
Our user experience (UX) team needed to optimize a new design for a specific browser size. However, which size should they optimize for? Before we had access to web analytics, they might have made an educated guess or surveyed our internal teams. But, thanks to web analytics, we could determine our users’ browser sizes. And that’s what we did!
Most of our users opt for browsers of the following widths:
- 1200 and 1400 pixels (37 percent of people)
- 1500 to 1600 pixels wide (13 percent)
- 1900 to 1999 pixels (16 percent)
5. What links are people clicking on our Help Center pages?
Knowing the links that people click and don’t click on our Help Center pages helps us optimize the pages to include the most helpful information. We recently optimized our Help Center pages in the following ways:
- Identified the pages with the most views.
Many people visit our persona-based pages, especially the Developer page. However, the pages that describe our capabilities, such as Integrate Apps and Connect Apps, get fewer visits. We’re adding more helpful links to the persona-based pages and will soon remove the capabilities pages.
- Identified the links on the pages with the most clicks.
We’re identifying the most popular links on the capabilities pages and adding them to the appropriate persona-based pages (Developer, Business User, and Administrator).
Although we are removing the individual capabilities pages, we’ll soon deliver a new Capabilities page that will provide a compact introduction to the key features and benefits of Oracle Integration.
Great for questions and for learning more
Web analytics can inform our decisions when we have specific questions and problems about how people use our content. And even when we don’t have a particular question, web analytics offer insights into who’s reading our content. In the next blog, I’ll share information about the people who visit our pages, including the countries they live in, their preferred browsers and devices, and more.