Any active Pulse users out here?

[TR Lisa]

We just got Pulse integrated with Flare and I'm finding the documentation a little clunky and not so helpful, and it's very community-centric. We are just looking to Pulse for analytics right now--not the social community features.

Would be great to have a dialog going here as we work our way through it all. To start with I'm trying to figure out if report data is real time or how often it's refreshed. I'm searching our Prod help system and not seeing my search terms in the reports. Also trying to figure out if it's possible to integrate Pulse and Flare on a QA server so we can test in a safe environment and also use the social community features there only to gather internal content feedback.

[Kimota12]

Were you successful in your implementation? We were interested in purchasing in order to track our users' actions within the help system, but there doesn't seem to be much information from actual Pulse users. What I have read doesn't seem good but most of the comments are a few years old.

[DaveMags]

I'd also be interested to hear how things are going. Like you, we too are looking at Pulse just for the data collection.

[TR Lisa]

I'd also be interested to hear how things are going. Like you, we too are looking at Pulse just for the data collection.

Things aren't going so well. While I like the data Pulse can provide, the UI has some bugs and usability issues. Also, one of our targets stopped reporting feedback in February and MadCap has yet to resolve the issue for us. I'll post again when I have better news

[Paul_N]

I was planning to take a look at Pulse too. It would be useful to know which help pages our users access the most for example, or which they rate the best/worst.

Looks like it could be tricky and time consuming to get working well though, from what I'm reading here...

[TR Lisa]

I gave up on Pulse. And I don't see any signs of MadCap investing in its future. Can't recall if there have been any updates to it in the last months. Besides the wonky UI, I continue to see report data in the UI report that doesn't match the same report data exported to Excel. Like not even close. We are not going to renew our support license. $2400 a year is too much for something that doesn't work. If someone else has had a better experience I'd be interested in hearing about it!

[ChoccieMuffin]

We are thinking about using Google Analytics when we eventually get HTML5 going, as we'll be hosting the help on our own servers. Not sure if that's a possibility for help hosted at client sites though, I'm still really, really early on in that investigation.

[TR Lisa]

I've been using GA for about a year now. It's useful, but I can't get the same search phrases and search phrases with no results reports from GA, and those are especially helpful reports.

[cdschroeder]

I've been using GA for about a year now. It's useful, but I can't get the same search phrases and search phrases with no results reports from GA, and those are especially helpful reports.

With a little bit of extra code, you can set up GA to report both search phrases and searches with no results.

For general search term tracking, see Mike Kelley's post here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27867

For searches with no results (and also with filters!), see Dave Lee's comments on the same thread.

[TR Lisa]

I've been using GA for about a year now. It's useful, but I can't get the same search phrases and search phrases with no results reports from GA, and those are especially helpful reports.

With a little bit of extra code, you can set up GA to report both search phrases and searches with no results.

For general search term tracking, see Mike Kelley's post here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27867

For searches with no results (and also with filters!), see Dave Lee's comments on the same thread.

Thanks for sharing that. I had heard rumblings about this being possible, just no time to look into it anytime soon. I'll eventually get there though Gotta get through a massive help site re-design, re-launch, dual maintenance, and sunsetting exercise first.