Beware of this Publish Online Analytics Limitation
Editor’s note:Â This shortcoming was fixed in InDesign CC 2018 version 13.1
I’m a big fan of InDesign’s Publish Online feature. But if you create multiple Publish Online documents, particularly for multiple clients, there is one big limitation to the analytics feature that you should be aware of.
When you choose File > Publish Online Dashboard, you are brought to a Web page that looks like this:
If you click on Analytics in the upper-left corner, you will be brought to either an Overview or Document Trends screen, depending on which you visited last.
The Document Trends screen shows you simple analytics, with separate data for each document, which is great. (Views and Readers can be different, because Views is the number of times the document has been viewed, but readers is how many unique readers have viewed the document. So, for example, a document may be viewed 100 times, but by only 4 unique readers.)
But when you visit the Overview screen, things are different. This screen provides additional, useful data, such as what types of devices visitors are using, average read time, etc. But this is aggregate data for all the documents currently published. There is no way to separate this data out per document. So, if you’ve published documents for multiple clients, there is no way to provide each client with their own analytics data beyond what displays on the Document Trends screen.
This is unfortunate. I hope that Adobe sees fit to beef up these basic analytics capabilities in the future.
I couldn’t agree more. InDesign’s online publishing feature has a lot of potential. But in a digital industry where customers want analytics this feature falls short.
Have you heard any rumblings of an Adobe update to the analytics?
Agreed, we know they (Adobe) have very strong analytics tools so hopefully they will break the data apart for each individually published document as you mentioned in Overview. Until that happens this publish online analytics piece will be a hurdle for professionals that need this more granular data breakdown which is very necessary for analyzing readers behaviors. FYI, I’ve voiced my opinion with Adobe on this matter and would advise others to do the same.
Note that Adobe fixed this shortcoming in InDesign CC 2018 version 13.1
Thanks, Keith. I added a note about that to the top of the post.