Adobe RoboHelp: Adding Google Analytics to Topics

by Willam van Weelden  

 

Insight into the usage of your help content helps to identify difficult or incoherent policies, procedures or parts of your software. For example, if you notice that a specific instruction is used frequently, it may mean that the process is unclear. Otherwise readers wouldn't need to access your help so much.

 

Adobe offers RoboHelp server as an add-on product for tracking help usage. But you can also use Google Analytics. It offers fewer options but is completely free! Here are the steps to add Google Analytics tracking to your help content:

 

Create a Google Analytics Account

 

Before you get started, create a free Google Analytics account. Then follow these steps to set up your help site:

1. Go to the Admin page.
2. In Account, click the drop-down menu and choose Create new account.
   
     
3. Fill in the form and click Get Tracking ID.
4. Copy the Website Tracking code to your clipboard.
   
     

Add Google Analytics code to RoboHelp

 

Follow these steps to add the tracking code to RoboHelp:

1. Create a Master Page or open an existing Master Page. (Project > Pods > Output Setup > Master Pages)
2. Click Edit Footer to add a footer to the Master Page.
   
     
3. Switch to HTML view.
4. Paste the tracking code into the footer section.
   
    
5. Assign the Master Page to all topics.
6. Generate your output and place the help on a web server.

Once you place the help on a server, it may take up to two days before you will see tracking results. 

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Looking to learn RoboHelp? Come join me for my live, two-day online RoboHelp class (held once each month). And if you'd like to learn more about Dynamic Filters, check out my 3-hour mini course: Adobe RoboHelp: Advanced Content Reuse.

Comments

[Debbie]

Have you managed to get google analytics page info using HTML 5 responsive output. I have Robohelp 2015 but all of my google analytics show as coming from the page index.htm although the analytics code is on every topic file. I'm assuming because the path ends in index.htm#t=TopicTitle.htm so its working as a SPA.

[Willam van Weelden]

That's strange as the topics are loaded in an iframe and should still report the topic. The path you see is from the start page only. This behaviour is similar to WebHelp where the topics are reported correctly. I'll look into this further.

[Willam van weelden]

Adobe has issued a patch for this problem. Please see: https://www.adobe.com/support/robohelp/downloads.html