Measuring the docs

Tech writers need data: it helps with deciding priorities, understanding the user, and measuring success. But documentation presents some interesting challenges: you can't measure docs the way you measure marketing content.

Remember: the primary aim of documentation is to help users. This means the key metric is user success.

Terminology

I'm going to throw around a few terms in this section, so here's a quick glossary:

• Quant: quantitative data. This is any data that comes as hard numbers. For example, "32% of new customers surveyed this year mentioned docs as a purchasing factor."
• Qual: qualitative data. For example, user interviews, session recordings.
• (Web) analytics: quantitative data, gathered using tools like Google Analytics or Plausible.
• Long and short: a way of splitting marketing activities. 'Short' is short term (sales activation), while 'long' is long term (brand building). The Short of It is a very short video by Les Binet that explains the concepts and is well worth a watch. It's relevant for this guide when you get into Handling the unmeasurable.