I’ve successfully harangued a pair of my colleagues (Rachel and Kevin) into getting our feet wet implementing some growth engineering tactics in our larger hospitality strategy. That strategy is, of course, to make WordPress.com customers the happiest customers in the world.

Here’s the 1.0 of the plan:

1. Each of us will individually analyze the Google Analytics data for http://en.support.wordpress.com/
2. From that data, we will each find what we see as the three documents with the highest traffic but also the highest bounce rate, indicating lots of views, and lots of departures from that document. The idea here being that these docs will either be the very best (customers problems are solved, and they go to their Dashboard to implement the solution) or the worst (customers simply abandon their search and head to Google. Or Buzzfeed. Probably Buzzfeed.)
3. Add a pop-up survey to the bottom of each of these high-traffic-high-bounce sites asking general questions about the quality of the doc, feedback, etc. We haven’t sussed out these questions yet.
4. Let the survey run for a few weeks, being vigilant to any support requests it might gather.
5. Read the responses & confer with the documentation folks to work on improvements.
6. Track the docs over time, watch for a change of bounce rate.

For a first dive, I’m hopeful. It will give us a chance to work together as a team, become familiar with the tools at hand (Google Analytics and Qualaroo, in this case), and hopefully iterate into bigger and better things!

• Work