Introducing Project Metrics in ReadMe

Understanding both who your users are and how they are interacting with your documentation is very important. We sought out to answer questions such as “What were people trying to find in our docs?”, “Which pages do people dislike?”, “Which pages are the most popular?”, “How are people using the API Explorer?”, etc. We built a number of metrics into ReadMe to answer these very questions and many more. These are broken down into two main categories: high level stats about how people in general are using your documentation and information to understand specific users.

High Level Metrics

We surface a number of metrics that are useful for gauging how active your documentation is, and how it is changing over time. We tried to focus on metrics that are actionable, for example if something is being searched repeatedly, it probably is a pain point for your users.

We also added a new feature to collect feedback from your users about what they think of specific documentation pages. You can see this in action at https://readme.readme.io/docs.

On any documentation page users can leave feedback on how helpful the page was, and it will be used to calculate which pages are the best and
worst in your project. This is incredibly useful for figuring which pages need revisiting, or what features are especially confusing.

There is also additional logging for the API Explorer, so you can get an overview of how people are using your reference section and if most requests are successful or not.

Leads

We also added visibility into who is viewing your docs. You will be able to see which companies have viewed your project and what actions they’ve taken (viewing pages, voting on pages, and searches). This is very useful for gauging a potential customers interest in your project.

You will be able to click into each company and get more information about who they are, as well as how they’ve been interacting with your documentation.

What’s Next

All of these features are now available to customers on our enterprise plan, and we will be continuously adding more metrics and ways of interacting with the data.

Not an enterprise customer yet, but want to upgrade? Email growth@readme.io and we’d love to get you set up!