From First Visit to Signup: Funnel Analytics for Your Help Centre
SupportPages analytics now has conversion funnels: follow visitors from a first help-centre visit through the articles they read to the actions they take.
Back in March I wrote that documentation has a silent-success problem - when docs work, nothing happens, so nobody measures them. We shipped analytics to fix the first half: you can see what gets read.
This week shipped the second half: what happens next.
Funnels
SupportPages analytics now tracks the full path a visitor takes - from first landing on your help centre, through the articles they read, to what they do afterwards - as a proper funnel, with drill-downs at every step.
Click into any stage and see who dropped off there, where they'd come from, and which page lost them. It's the difference between "the help centre had 400 visitors" and "referral traffic from the onboarding email reads the custom-domain article, then half of them stall on the DNS step".
One of those is a number. The other is a to-do list.
Docs are a sales surface. Almost nobody treats them that way.
Here's the thing I underestimated for years: prospects read your documentation before they buy. It's due diligence. The help centre answers the question every landing page dodges - "what's this actually like to use?"
Which means docs aren't just a cost centre deflecting tickets. They're quietly part of your funnel. Some articles reassure evaluators. Some articles sit at the exact spot where trials stall. Until you can follow the path, you can't tell which is which - you're maintaining every article as if it mattered equally, and they don't.
Now the loop closes properly:
- Generate articles from your code, so coverage isn't rationed
- Measure what gets read and where readers came from
- Follow the path to see which docs precede signups - and which precede disappearances
- Fix the drop-off points, which usually means a clearer article, which takes minutes when articles are generated
Dogfooding note
We run this on our own site, obviously. The number of assumptions about our own funnel that survived contact with the drill-down view was: not many. I'll write that post-mortem up separately once the changes have had time to breathe - the early lesson is the boring, eternal one: measure before you redesign.
Funnel analytics is live on paid plans now. Start free at supportpages.io, or book a demo and I'll walk you through your own funnel.
About the Author
Simon Moxon has been building SaaS companies since 2009. He's scaled teams to 20+ people, hit £2m ARR, and learned most of the lessons the hard way. Now he's building SupportPages.io - help docs that write themselves when you ship code. He writes about what's changed in SaaS and what hasn't.