Welcome to the first installment in our blog series, where we explore the ROI of technical content and the importance of identifying and quantifying core Key performance indicators for your documentation.

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In today's digitally demanding era, customers expect seamless access to comprehensive technical documentation and prompt issue resolution. As technical writers and content creators, it falls upon us to deliver high-quality documentation that meets these expectations and fosters brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. To ensure our content performs optimally, we have to harness the power of metrics and track key performance indicators (KPIs).

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This is not an easy task for documentation teams; according to a survey on ROI conducted by Herreto, writing teams that have specific content goals are 7X more productive each week, but only 28% of documentation teams are being measured on specific KPIs.

42% of respondents say they are lacking management support to put together the ROI.

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So, where to begin?

Measuring Content Performance

As a start, let's delve into the significance of metrics and their vital role in benchmarking your technical content performance against industry standards. Before we explore the benefits of metrics and benchmarking, let's establish a foundation by considering some essential KPIs we want to measure.

1. Content Engagement: Measures user interaction with your content, including likes, shares, and downloads.
2. Traffic Sources: Assesses how users discover and access your content, encompassing organic search, direct traffic, and social media referrals.
3. Search Queries: Tracks how users search for and find information on your site, including the number of queries and the success rate of those searches. Success=Self-Service.
4. Self-service Success Rate: Measures the effectiveness of your self-service content in resolving user issues without requiring customer support.

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Benefits of Metrics

Employing metrics to track and analyze technical content performance brings forth several benefits that can positively impact your business:

1. Identifying areas for improvement: By monitoring KPIs, you can pinpoint shortcomings in your content and make necessary changes to enhance user satisfaction. These changes, for example, can be in your tagging, content freshness, missing or old content that needs to be updated or deprecated, etc.
2. Reducing support costs: Effective self-service content, driven by metrics, can deflect support cases, resulting in reduced costs and improved customer experiences.
3. Driving product adoption: Metrics shed light on user engagement with your content, facilitating a better understanding of how to promote product adoption. Example indicators for your content supporting product adoption can be # of returning users, CTR, and more.

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The Importance of Benchmarking

Once you have identified your KPIs and how you can measure them, benchmarking your technical content performance against industry standards is pivotal to grasping your users' documentation experience and identifying areas for improvement.

By aligning your KPIs with relevant industry benchmarks, you can gain a clear understanding of your performance and actionable insights to drive improvements.

To assist you in analyzing your KPIs and comparing them to industry benchmarks, Zoomin published “The Technical Content Benchmark Report”. In this report, we meticulously analyzed content interactions performed by 16 million users from 136 countries in 60 million sessions and identified for you:

1. The most critical KPIs to track
2. The industry benchmark for each KPI 
3. How to influence each KPI and win.

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We understand how important it is to improve and stay ahead of the competition continuously. We strive to equip you with the tools and resources necessary to measure your impact and value. To that end, we have been conducting benchmark workshops with numerous customers- analyzing their users' interactions with content and aligning them with desired goals. The outcomes have been nothing short of remarkable, with tangible and rapid improvements across various key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some notable successes:

1. Impressive Traffic Growth: Companies witnessed a staggering increase in traffic by up to 600%. By optimizing their content and user experience, they attracted more visitors and expanded their reach.
2. Significant Cost Savings: Through streamlining publication processes, organizations achieved savings of up to $200,000. Efficient content workflows and automation resulted in reduced expenses and improved operational efficiency.
3. Skyrocketing Self-Service Rates: Customer self-service rates soared to an impressive 97%. By providing comprehensive and user-friendly documentation, companies empowered their users to resolve issues independently, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced support demands.
4. High Case Deflection Rates: Companies achieved case deflection rates ranging from 60% to 70%. By delivering comprehensive and easily accessible technical content, customers found answers to their queries without needing to reach out for support, reducing support costs and improving resolution times.

These success stories highlight the transformative power of identifying, tracking, and measuring content KPIs and benchmarking and taking actionable steps to improve your content performance. You, as a documentation leader, can showcase a real and quantifiable impact on your leadership. Technical Content is a significant contributor to companies' cost reductions, efficiencies, revenue growth, and brand. Now, you know how to tell this story.

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What's Next?

Stay tuned for our next blog post in this series, where we delve deeper into the realm of self-service and case deflection. We will discuss various methodologies to measure case deflection and offer a clear formula that captures the real impact of your content in giving users a frictionless self-serve experience.

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Read the full "Technical Content Benchmark Report" for 2023

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