Focused Analytics

Heather Wendt

Hey all!

So, we know that analytics are a crucial part of community management, but it can be an area that many community managers struggle with.

I know that I have a standard set of analytics I look at weekly, monthly, and yearly:

• Total Members - how is growth doing?
• Active Members - how many members are logging in and doing something?
• Contributors - how many members are contributing content of some sort?
• Members Reacting - what is post engagement outside of comments like?
• Page View by Roles - what pages are my personas looking at?
• Discussions
  • New Threads - how many new discussions are occuring?
  • Comments - are posts getting responses?
  • Time to First Comment - how long does it take for a response to come in?
• Search info - what are members looking for? Is it something that is found?
• KB article views - what content is getting traction? What content is not?

What are some of the metrics you track and what insights are you looking for?

stefanieb

Hi @Heather Wendt,
Something I've started to look more closely at are the most viewed discussions month over month (by adjusting the time settings in analytics)

I've been looking for trends to see if each month there are common questions that people keep going back to. Then I evaluate the answer. Is there a best answer? Does it link to documentation? Is the documentation accurate/Is the best answer accurate?

If I determine that more could be done to improve the documentation or the best answer, I'll make those edits. Then I'll work with our support team to also track support cases created on this topic.

If I can see rates of support cases going down after making an edit to that commonly viewed question, and the rate of views of the question staying the same or perhaps even going up I feel more comfortable with an inference of deflection savings (If views of the discussion had gone down and cases had too, but views of the documentation had gone up- I would also feel comfortable making an inference about deflection based on this data).

I really like the point you make about page views by role- I've also recently started to look at questions posted by business segment because our Category structure supports that effort. It's been exciting to watch an increased rate of discussions in key segments since our initial launch with Vanilla Community!

Heather Wendt

Absolutely love this @stefanieb! What a great example of taking metrics and using it to strengthen the content, support, and overall customer experience!! And being able to breakout out business segment questions can drive those insights into persona experiences. Thanks so much for sharing!