Tracking 'time to first engagement'

Heather Wendt

Hi all!

I am working on strengthening my metric tracking for 2023 and would love to be able to track how long it takes a new member to engage. I have played around with the report building tool and just haven't seemed to land on the right combination to pull that data. Has anyone been able to do this and if so, would you be willing to share the how? Thanks much!

PiperWilson

Hi @Heather Wendt!

Can you give us an idea of what you've tried so far?

Heather Wendt

Hi Piper!

So, I have a tried a few variations, but the one I was hoping would work was the data point "First Comment?" Unfortunately I am not savvy enough to figure out how to compare account set up to any community interaction (new thread, comment, post engagement, resource viewing)...I did get a result with Community posts as a table with the First Comment data point, but it just game me a random number...(17 in this case) which I am guessing means how many 1st time commenters we had but that is just a guess...

Thanks much!!

Heather Wendt

PS - would LOVE a data report cookbook...hint hint ;)

Branwyn T

Heyo Heather!

Honestly, I think using the API for this might be your best bet.

If you simply want to use "visited the site" as a time to engagement tool, the call:

/api/v2/users.csv?limit=5000&page=1

will return a CSV file of the first 5000 users with dateInserted and dateLastActive fields, as shown here:

If you want to use "first discussion" or "first comment" as a time to engagement tool, the calls:

/api/v2/discussions.csv?sort=dateInserted&insertUserID={userID}

and

/api/v2/comments.csv?sort=dateInserted&insertUserID={userID}

will return a CSV file of the first 30 discussions or comments by the given userID.

You can then import the CSV files into Excel and work a little wizardry to get your Time to Engagement.

Obviously, it would be even easier if you could have someone write a script that steps through the user list and pulled the first post for each userID and calculated it for you, but this would be the approach I take to getting that metric.

Heather Wendt

Thanks @Branwyn Tylwyth ! Great information!

So, now another (related) request...anyone out there willing to do a quick crash course on how to do things with APIs? I have always had a web dev person to work their voodoo magic when I needed anything outside of some basic HTML work, and while I see the great list of Vanilla's existing APIs and of course Branwyn gave amazing step by steps on what APIs to use in this case, I have no idea what to do with them to make them dance... 🤔 Any help would be absolutely AMAZING!!

Adrian

Hey @Heather Wendt you should check out this course @Branwyn Tylwyth gave

https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/4882#Comment_4882

Heather Wendt

Thanks @Adrian! I will definitely check it out!!