Properly measuring intranet performance is critical for the success of your platform.
Using data that reflects how employees use your intranet, what they feel about it and how the intranet impacts your organisation is the best way to deliver a modern, relevant channel which will keep on improving.
Having a robust intranet metrics strategy and program allows you to:
- make informed decisions on how to improve your intranet, right down to the page level
- revise your intranet content strategy and management processes to create a more engaging intranet for end users
- improve the performance and impact of content and internal communications
- engage and motivate site owners and community managers to optimise and advance their own areas of the intranet
- drive a process and culture of continuous improvement
- understand intranet performance on mobile and tablet and how your workforce is accessing information
- help your intranet to deliver strategic benefits to your organisation
- reveal insights about your workforce
- fit in with standard reporting processes already in operation in your organisation
- demonstrate the success of your intranet to senior stakeholders, which can reflect ROI and contribute to making a business case for more intranet investment
- validate decisions which might be unpopular with some stakeholders
Despite the obvious value in measuring your intranet, many teams do not choose to make it a priority activity, or they measure in ways which do not deliver value.
Challenges to measuring intranets
- teams are not always sure what to measure or even where to start
- they don't know how to interpret the results
- they haven’t got the right tools to measure the impact of your intranet health
- they don't always measure the right things, instead focusing on easy or convenient metrics
- teams are too busy or have resource constraints so cannot make metrics a priority
- individuals and teams may be worried that measuring the intranet will put them in a negative light
The good news is that if you’re not as far ahead as you’d like to be with your intranet metrics, there are some straightforward things you can do to improve in this area.
5 Best Practices for Measuring Your Intranet
1. Develop an intranet metrics strategy and roadmap
Turn your ideas into action by establishing or formalising an intranet metrics strategy.
- What do you want to achieve?
- What are you doing now that could be improved?
- What do you need to do to get where you want to be?
- How does your metrics strategy fit in with other approaches to analytics and reporting within your organisation?
Articulating this and working on a related roadmap or plan will help you to action the strategy, and get you on the road to improving your intranet.
2. Talk to your stakeholders
You want to make sure your intranet reporting resonates with your core audience. Talk to senior stakeholders to seek their opinions. Check if site and community managers are engaged through your metrics program. Based on their feedback, make any necessary tweaks.
Additionally, if you do want to include related metrics such as levels of email usage or calls to the IT helpdesk, speak to the owners of relevant systems and services to find out how these can be included.
3. Optimise and understand your intranet metrics dashboard
Most intranet metrics dashboards can be configured by their administrators, certainly on the set of pages that are being reported upon. Many intranets will integrate with Google Analytics and pull in that data. Investigate the possibilities and see if there is scope to optimise your intranet metrics. This may also be an opportunity to find out how each of the metrics is specifically derived. This can reveal some of the nuances behind the numbers and give you additional insight.
4. Reformat your reporting and overhaul the related process
If you’re adding to your reporting, then it’s a good time to review if the format is right for what you want to achieve.
- Does it deliver the right message to the right people?
- Is it a presentation or spreadsheet?
- Can you give direct access to a dashboard?
If you’re looking at your reporting, you may also need to re-look at the related processes for gathering the metrics too.
5. Diarise a review of metrics and plan actions
There's little point measuring your intranet unless you then act on the suggestions. This will help drive continuous improvement. One way to help ensure this happens is to diarise a review of metrics and then plan any associated actions. This review could fit in with when you do your reporting. Most teams who take this approach review monthly or quarterly.
Measuring Intranet Success Guide and Workbook
For more information on how to improve intranet ROI while maximising workforce efficiency, read our Ultimate Guide to Measuring & Improving Intranet Success.
The guide outlines what you should be measuring with a focus on 7 different areas:
1. Usage
2. User satisfaction
3. Engagement and participation
4. Mobile usage
5. Usability and productivity
6. Impact on other channels
7. Organisational KPIs