1. What is Monetate?

Monetate provides digital merchandising, testing, and personalization technology and services that help its clients drive engagement by delivering optimal customer experiences, and thus driving revenue.

2. What was the challenge you were facing before using Archbee?

We knew we needed a developer hub separate from our knowledge base for two primary reasons. The first reason was to publish the developer-focused documentation on a platform that was better suited to the types of content typically found on developer hubs. The second reason was to publicly publish the API references for Monetate’s various APIs, which had only been available to clients within Monetate’s user interface. By creating the Monetate Developer Hub, we hope not only to give clients better access to code resources they need for Monetate’s growing suite of RESTful APIs and SDKs, but also we hope to attract more prospective clients by making public these developer resources.

To expand on that first reason, we recognized that we needed a separate platform for the developer-focused documentation because our knowledge base platform didn’t offer a robust, out-of-the-box setup for OpenAPI/Swagger-based documentation. Our KB platform provider offers a lot of features that give us quite a bit of flexibility, and it’s supported by amazing folks. However, it acknowledges that it doesn’t have built-in support for OpenAPI spec files and that while its clients can set up RESTful API documentation using Redoc, the client must put in the work to customize what Redoc puts out. Monetate’s own developers and engineers are dedicated to the products and services it provides clients, so we didn’t really have available the people we’d need to build out our own bespoke implementation of Redoc within our KB. Consequently, we sought out a separate platform that better specializes in developer-focused documentation.

3.  Why Archbee over the alternatives?

We selected Archbee because the flexibility, options, and performance it offers at the price point are superior to the two other candidates that we decided were worth testing. We greatly appreciated that Archbee’s been willing to customize how it parses our API reference files, which immediately set it apart from the two other candidates. Testing it as both a writer and content admin, I quickly determined that only Archbee offered the ability to include an image with a numbered step—and this formatting doesn’t seem like such a big thing, but when you have a number of task docs, being able to include a screenshot with each numbered step is a big thing! My fellow tech writer and I also appreciated that Archbee’s editor isn’t buggy, offers the ability to have a draft that’s separate from the published version, and also has a means of setting up a review process for those drafts.

 As our Archbee trial continued, I also quickly recognized how responsive the support folks are. Since I approached our testing as both a tech writer and a content admin, I really appreciate getting help from the platform provider because I’m not a code developer/engineer and thus need some experts to fix stuff!

4. Can you share any business outcomes?

Since officially launching Monetate Developer Hub on 5 September, a fair number of Monetate employees have raved about how much better the developer documentation looks. Because I set up GA4 for our dev hub, I have access to the analytics, and the number of visitors has been quite surprising. At times the number of visitors hitting the dev hub is greater than the number of visitors hitting the KB. I don’t have enough of a breakdown to draw any real insights from that traffic shift, but…hey, I’m just thrilled that so many people are going to the dev hub!

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