Confluence is messy by nature. When your instance reaches thousands of pages and hundreds of results for your pages, your users may have a hard time finding what they need. Analytics are an invaluable help to make sure that you improve the performance of your Confluence Cloud instance and prioritize your maintenance efforts wisely. But does Confluence have native analytics? And what should you do with the data?
It depends on your plan. Confluence Cloud only offers analytics in its Premium and Enterprise Tiers. The Confluence Cloud Free and Standard tiers don’t include analytics.
Note that I work for resolution, the manufacturer of the app. There might be other products that do a similar job.
Confluence Analytics shipped with the Premium and Enterprise plans include insights on spaces and on pages. In addition to views, metrics on each page include:
Additionally, it’s possible to drill down on the activity per user to see:
Confluence Analytics are included in the plans mentioned above. The pricing for Premium Plans is of 10.50 USD per user per month, or the equivalent of 12.6k USD per year for every hundred users. However, there are cheaper alternatives, including the Google Analytics for Confluence integration, which shares a lot of the same functionality but also allows to dig deeper in Google Analytics.
Without analytics, you have no idea whether your Confluence content is being read. With Confluence analytics, you can track performance and generate insights that will help you create, edit and optimize Confluence content at scale.
Here are 4 basic ideas on how to use Confluence analytics to improve Confluence.
What are your users reading? Are they just going to the main landing pages and sections on your place, or are they also accessing less obvious pieces? What does this tell you about the content that your users need? What you want to do is consider that traffic to decide where to spend time on improving the documentation.
Some of your documentation in Confluence is critical. Employee onboarding. Product configuration. Company policies. If users can’t find it, they probably won’t read it. With analytics, you can identify which pieces of critical information are being found and which ones need a communication push.
Make this test. Go to the top 10 most visited pages and read them. If there are any guides or walkthroughs, use them. Test them. Do you get any blockers? Is any information missing? Is anything inaccurate or outright wrong?
It’s probably too much effort to test every page – so make sure you use analytics to prioritize content with actual impact.
When your insights are powered by Google Analytics, you can also access deeper analysis on the Google side. For example:
In order to add Google Analytics to Confluence, you will need a marketplace integration app like resolution’s Google Analytics for Confluence.
Here’s how you can set it up once you download it from the Marketplace:
Confluence Analytics has three different levels of data: Instance, Space, & Page. Google Analytics for Confluence supports all levels.
The search function in Confluence is very powerful.
You can simply type the “/” character to trigger it when navigating Confluence. Anything you type will give you results in:
Search will first look into the names of all these entities, but will go further and search for hits if the keyword in the content – unless you restrict it to titles in the advanced search.
Among other options, advanced search includes the ability to filter by space, contributor, or specific parent pages.
Besides the advanced search, some operators are also supported:
Expressions can also be nested using parentheses. See more examples
According to Atlassian, while all documents have the same chances of appearing in the results, some factors are weighted to create the ranking. The more important are these two:
Very often, Confluence searches are slow and yield irrelevant results because the instance is cluttered with pages that are out of date or poorly maintained.
The first thing you have to do to improve a Confluence search is archive old content. However, before you do start cleaning up, it’s recommendable to make a quick health check with Confluence analytics:
An app like Google Analytics for Confluence can help you gather insights quickly and make an in-depth analysis for sources to pages where you’re undecided on how to proceed.
Other tactics that you should implement but also require maintenance are:
Capi [resolution]
Inbound Marketing | Thought Leadership
Resolution
Berlin, Germany
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