Hit counters in WebHelp

[Kathy_Bine]

Hi there,

I'm sick of hearing the phrase, "Nobody reads the help."

My retort is that "People do read help if it's helpful."

Proving that people will use help when it's helpful is difficult without metrics, though.

Sure would be great to get a hit counter in the pages so that I can see how many people are using help, and could see which pages they view most and least frequently. I want my own hit counter, btw, because web admins tell me that it's difficult to separate out the statistics for help versus the rest of the application.

I'm guessing that WebHelp would be the best approach, since there should be ample code available for, um, reuse.

If you have an alternative approach to collecting the data to support this, please let me know. Thanks!

--Kathy

[Guest]

I use L=awstats]http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ it is a detailed setup, highly customizable log analyzer. If you have your webhelp on a server and are comfortable setting up a perl program, it is a great tool. If you decide to use it I have several links that are helpful with setup and I'm willing to help in any way I can.

Since I've installed it, it's been great to see that are customers DO look at the help—and often. We have about 100 banks we provide software to and last month we had nearly 1000 visits to our help and 250 unique users (internal and external).

Let me know if I can help.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Kathy.

Another more belt and braces approach would be to use the RoboHelp Server application. This gives you the ability not only the see the hits that your help pages get but also record the questions users ask for in the search but don't get any response. These and other reports are a really useful way to plug any documentation gaps as well as just recording hits.

The latest version RH Server 8 is a big improvement on earlier versions and you can publish to it from either RH7 (with the 7.0.3 patch installed) as well as RH8. I have a number of posts on my blog if you require further information relating to RH Server. Just select the "RoboHelp Server" category.

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