When it comes to demonstrating the importance of an active community to a company, there are far too many executives who are not completely convinced until you prove the ROI by showing some serious numbers. That was my first goal when I decided to begin measuring our community’s growth. Understanding community traffic and visitor clickstream behavior is crucial to gaining insight into a community. So far Metrics have helped me identify important pages, learn about member behavior, and adjust strategies according to what seems to work. My biggest challenge when I begun my metrics analysis was deciding on which parameters to set as a measure. After some research, I have come up with a short list that I feel are the most important factors to take into consideration when setting up my community analytics.
5 responses so far ↓
Kad // October 27, 2008 at 9:07 pm
This is fascinating to see the development in online communities and spreading across all types of industries. I understand this is still fairly new, and establishing efficient metrics is complex. I thought that the comments on blogs and forums were the criteria to measure communities, but it seems there is much more to it. On another nore, I am wondering if short videos will be more and more used in online communities, and if it will include video calls?
laylasabourian // October 27, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Hi Kad: Yes I think with the evolution of Web3.0, video and mobile technologies are going to be key players. Thanks for reading my blog!!
Bev // October 28, 2008 at 6:57 am
Excellent points Layla!
Page views, unique visitors and new memberships are great value points and generally speaking, are the most accessible metrics. Based on your graph, you are reporting on engagement and loyalty (which speaks to longer-term relationships and the perceived value of customer advocacy via community). In addition, you may be able to use your metrics to show how community can aid in the cost reduction of support features (call avoidance, member-to-member solves for technical issues, products, etc.).
A suggestion for others trying to decide which “parameters to set up as a measure” – consider what information you want to know about your users but more importantly, know how you want to use it and then you can determine how to measure it (i.e.: ABC123Company wants to grow certain segments – can we identify what segments our community members fall into and show that the community is contributing to the companies efforts to grow/target that segment).
Last but not least (and probably the hardest to measure), take a look at customer/user comments that engage the community ecosystem (offsite) in a broader conversation, customers who are so excited about the way they are treated, they tell stories about you (your company).
Parham // November 5, 2008 at 12:41 am
Good article Layla!
There are many tools available for measuring the success of your community.
In my opinion, the most important one for an enterprise community such as Logitech, VMware, or Dell, the success lies within “outside fanatics” and “inside champions”.
Return and repeated visits of outside fanatics and product passionates are key for the community success.
Layla Sabourian // November 12, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Hi Parham: Interesting points, I would be curious to hear more thougts on the tools you suggested. Cheers.