Are You Monitoring the Right Metrics?

Intranet metrics are a tricky thing. One day they are up, the next day they are down. And just when you think you have it all figured out you come into work one morning and realize you have no idea what is going on.

Welcome to the ever changing world of intranet metrics.

Confusing as they may be, understanding and defining correct metrics is probably the single most important thing you can do to ensure long term success and adoption of your intranet.

Here’s how to get the most of your intranet metrics:

Determine the business problem you are trying to solve. Don’t assume that your business will improve ‘just because’ you adopt an intranet. You need to first understand what you are looking to improve. Is it internal communication? Is it collaboration? Or is it document sharing? Once you know this you can understand which metrics to watch.

Understand ALL the metrics. Adoption metrics alone won’t tell you everything, but they are an important starting off point to assess employee participation. There are a few other metrics to look out for as well:

Content views: It’s useful to understand what content is most (or least) popular. This will help you plan and adjust a long term content strategy. Some content will get more traffic than others, and some will receive more comments. It’s also important to look closely at the type of content your users create and upload on their own as this too will reveal a lot.

Page views: Page views are important because they provide insight into how employees are using the intranet to complete their work. Like all metrics, page views can be quite subjective to read. If you discover some pages aren’t accessed at all, it may not be because employees aren’t interested. Rather, it may be because they didn’t know it existed; or because the navigational path is too difficult and not worth the effort.

Application usage: Modern intranets have many different applications or features that can reveal a lot about what employees like or don’t like. For example, your discussion/chat feature may get a lot of usage, while document downloads doesn’t. Again, you might be surprised at what this really reveals. If a feature is difficult or time-consuming to use, you cannot expect employees to use it.

Select the right metrics. Once you’ve determined what you want from your intranet, you can then focus on selecting the corresponding metrics to monitor. For example, if your primary goal is to encourage employees to access internal documents, you will want to monitor document downloads.

Establish goals: It’s useful to create a baseline and begin measuring as soon as possible. Be careful that you don’t get over confident during peak participation events, like a wildly successful launch party which may unrealistically inflate metrics. Once you have established realistic and achievable goals, it’s time to set your targets to more ambitious goals.

Measure, monitor, and adjust. A failing metric doesn’t always mean a failed intranet. Monitoring intranet engagement metrics is an ongoing job that requires constant adjustments and revisions. Use the first few months as a learning process, and you will discover quickly where to adjust and where to amplify content.

What have your metrics taught you?

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