When companies decide to have their knowledge management in a wiki, such as Confluence, they often face a tough challenge: How to measure user engagement to justify the investment in Confluence? Questions might include:
These metrics are all crucial when asking yourself if your Confluence instance is “alive”.
Spoiler alert: The app Viewtracker – Analytics for Confluence by bitvoodoo can answer all of these questions and many more. Once installed, it starts tracking user activity right away. All you have to decide in the beginning is whether to track users by name or not. We’ll get back to that in the section “Data Privacy Settings”.
These questions can be answered thanks to helpful predefined Viewtracker reports.
Content Report: You can find out how many views each page or blog post attracts in a specific date range. This information is available on each page/blog post.
The page views, along with the number of created pages, edits, comments, etc, are then accumulated in the Space Report. The report displays the content with the most views as well as the most active users. Only space administrators and members of a specified group can access this report to protect users’ privacy.
Global Confluence activity can be assessed in the Global Content Report. This report contains the overall number of views, comments, etc. on your Confluence as well as the most active spaces, pages and users. It can be filtered by space, source, content type or with any CQL query of your choice. This comprehensive report can only be accessed by Confluence Administrators and members of a specified group.
If you are working with Confluence cloud, you can use the newly released Content&Usage Report.
The data accumulated in each report can be exported as a CSV file by an Administrator at any time.
As mentioned above, the Space and Global Report can only be accessed by specified individuals. Admins can also go a step further and pick a data privacy setting that collects less information about Confluence users. The most strict setting, “Extended Privacy Mode”, will only count the total of views, but there are also settings in between to suit each company’s individual need.
Administrators can choose not to track views in specific spaces (e.g. those containing sensitive information) or views made by certain users (e.g. anonymous users or members of a specific user group). These settings make sure that only the data relevant to your use case is collected.
Also, Administrators can decide to limit the Data Retention period from all time (default) to 1 year, 2 years, etc (on-premise only).
What are users actually searching for in Confluence? The Search Report presents this relevant information for Confluence Administrators. They can find the most sought-after keywords or keyword combinations as well as the number of results for that particular search. If a search yields no results at all, this can present excellent input for content creators: Do we need to create new content or update existing pages? Do we use labels for frequent misspellings, terms in other languages, etc.? Editors can now use this information to improve content pro-actively and based on actual user data.
Are the fancy sales presentations attached to a page actually being accessed by your users? Based on the file types specified in the settings, the Attachment Report can tell you which attachments are viewed how many times. For example, this information can help you assess whether PDFs or Powerpoint presentations are a popular medium among your users. If the attachment engagement is very low, even on pages with many page views, this might mean that attachments are not linked prominent enough in the content and therefore overlooked by readers.
The Viewtracker app tracks views, creates, edits, etc. out of the box. However, it also contains various macros that can be inserted on any Confluence page. Using the Report Macros, you can create pages that present individual pages’ or spaces’ performance in an appealing way.
The Space Analytics Macro displays the number of views, edits and creates in an individual space.
Viewtracker is a powerful app that collects relevant information on your Confluence users’ behaviour. The tracking starts right after installing the app. Administrators have full control over the data collected thanks to many granular settings (data privacy, exclusion of spaces, data retention, etc.). They can also export the data any time they wish.
Here is the full feature list of Viewtracker – Analytics for Confluence:
Get insight into how often your pages and blog posts were viewed and by whom (the latter only if the privacy settings allow it. See “Privacy Modes”)
Find out how often pages and blog posts are published, changed, liked and commented.
Which attached documents are viewed how many times? The Attachment Report is available on a space and global level.
Uncover your users’ search patterns and intentions when using the Confluence Search.
Analyse your content on a global or space-related level or for individual pages. Uncover the most active users, popular spaces and content.
Create pages that present individual pages or spaces’ performance in an appealing way.
An advanced option, interesting when integrating Viewtracker with other applications
Easily export data from your reports for further use.
Choose between different data privacy modes to protect your users’ information (GPDR Compliance).
Specify the period of time for which the data may be stored.
Find out how your content is accessed: via Desktop, the Confluence mobile app, your Jira Service Management Help Desk or the Linchpin mobile app?
Compare statistics of different spaces. Which are more active? What can you learn from them?
Use the CQL filter to generate reports according to your needs.
Whatever your reasons, disable tracking of certain spaces or user groups.
Import previously aggregated data with a few clicks.
Grant specific user groups access to the global and/or individual space reports.
