Intranet Metrics & KPIs – Understanding Intranet Analytics Best Practices

​An intranet is a long-term commitment that demands continuous monitoring, adjustment, and assessment. The primary goal of an intranet is to simplify internal communication and provide employees the right information and tools they need to be more efficient and productive. However, it is important to measure the performance and success of your intranet over time to understand how it can be improved.

Intranet metrics and KPIs help measure its effectiveness to introduce resources and improvements that engage the employees better and ultimately improve your bottom line. Let us discuss a few intranet performance metrics and intranet analytics best practices that help gain valuable insight into its effectiveness and success. 

Intranet Metrics & KPIs – A Complete Guide

Intranet metrics or intranet KPIs are measurable values that help track the performance of the intranet and determine whether it is achieving the goals set by the organization. Organizations often measure an intranet's effectiveness in specific ways. The right combination of key performance indicators gives a clear picture of how well the intranet is working in a company.

Let us look at the most popularly used intranet metrics and KPIs.

Employee Reach

In the past, not all employees could engage on the intranet platform. Employees who worked remotely or spent more time away from the office participated lesser on the intranet as compared to those who worked in the premises all the time. The shift to cloud-based intranet and mobile applications has made it possible for users to access the intranet from any location, increasing the reachability.

Reach percentage can be determined by tracking the number of unique visitors on the intranet during a period and dividing the number by the total number of employees in the company. This gives you the employee reach percentage. Using this figure against the baseline from previous years helps identify an increase.

Top Users

These are the employees spending the most time on the platform either naturally or as a part of their job as influencers. It is worth keeping track of which employees engage the most with the intranet. These users can suggest what they like about the intranet, what works for them, and what features need improvement.

Reduced Business Costs

A digital workplace can reduce costs in several ways including less spending on printing and less time spent on finding information. If the company hires remote workers, they don't take up physical space and therefore pass savings to the business. As they access information and collaborate digitally, the company can save from travel expenses, HR, and other costs.

Increase in Sales

When the company's sales team can access information easily, their productivity increases, and sales levels go up. Improved communication and collaboration with marketing and customer support teams further boost sales to new and existing customers. 

Intranet Analytics Best Practices – UPDATED 2021

 Though analytics is a core intranet activity, several organizations struggle to measure the effectiveness of their intranet platform for different reasons. However, it is possible to avoid such pitfalls and ultimately improve your intranet.

Here are some of the intranet analytics best practices that can help you achieve success.

Intranets are often implemented to achieve some strategic objectives like improved processes, increased employee engagement, and better customer service. To measure the impact of your intranet, select metrics that map back to your objectives. Using a variety of metrics would provide you useful insights into performance and core value.

Intranet analytics should provide insights and suggestions that drive associated actions and decisions to improve the adoption rate. Intranet teams are likely to get too busy, so consider incorporating a process to analyze metrics and take proper actions. Reviewing relevant metrics and taking actions on a monthly or quarterly basis helps ensure that your intranet keeps improving. Making intranet analytics a part of your regular review process would deliver real value to your organization.

Analytics help you measure the current performance of an intranet and shows whether it is at a standstill, improving, or deteriorating. But it is important to measure the situation before and after the changes were made. Teams often fail to show the complete impact of their projects so you should make sure you have sufficient figures to track performance.

Though metrics drive data-based decision-making, it is easy to become subjective and interpret a metric in different ways. It is essential to be objective and avoid using metrics that confirm your current concept. Figures that challenge you might often be the most insightful.

Metrics are quite powerful but need context to tell the full story. Moreover, if you are trying to convey performance to other people, numbers alone may not be sufficient. Combining metrics with some powerful anecdotes and stories would depict the value in a more impactful manner. Such a presentation also conveys the need for action. Collecting feedback, case studies, and stories should go with your metric measurements. 

Intranet Effectiveness & Success Factors

Organizations spend a lot of time and effort building their intranets, but it is important to find out whether it is really effective. Intranet analytics are useful at improving various areas of the platform to boost the adoption rates and its overall success.

Let us discuss some of the most significant factors that show the effectiveness and success of your intranet.

Most intranet managers look at the usage of the intranet to understand user behavior patterns. Apart from the number of visits and popular areas, they analyze information like the location and devices from which the pages are accessed. One of the most critical uses of intranet analytics is to understand the mobile experience of employees.

It is important to learn how well users engage with the intranet from their mobile devices. Here are the metrics that help understand the mobile experience of employees and the intranet's ability to engage users working beyond their workstations.

• Percentage of users visiting the mobile site
• Devices being used
• Locations from which users access the sites
• Tasks completed using mobile devices
• Parts of the website accessed using mobile devices
• User ratings for a mobile experience

Monitoring only the usage of the intranet doesn't provide information about how the employees engage. Chances are that employees visit the site and read content because it is compulsory. It is important to find whether the users really feel engaged and satisfied, as this affects the adoption rate of the intranet.

A quick poll or survey can be used to find out if the intranet is user-friendly and inviting, if it makes their work easier, and whether the users are satisfied. You can even arrange small meetings with intranet users to get their valuable feedback.

Intranet teams generally focus on the number of visitors coming to the intranet and the time spent by them. They also analyze the user behavior to understand frequently visited sites, pages with a high bounce rate, and other details. Such analytics are generated by dashboards built into the CMS. A good admin dashboard reveals insights about the percentage of the workspace using the intranet.

These dashboards let you generate reports to view information like:

• Number of pages visited
• Percentage of employees accessing the platform
• Number of unique visitors
• Popular pages
• Number of pages visited
• Bounce rates
• Types of devices used
• Locations of access
• Referral sites

You can then use the survey data to improve your intranet and adoption rate.

Higher levels of intranet use and more time spent on the platform don't necessarily imply higher user engagement levels. The advancement in intranet and social media technology has changed the way employees interact and work.

Employee engagement level depends on employee interaction. Measuring interaction gives you a clear picture of how engaged individual employees are with the intranet content. Higher levels of interaction suggest that your organization is connected well.

Some of the most significant factors suggesting employee engagement are:

• Participation rates
• Percentage of active users
• Individual user content engagement with the number of likes and comments
• Percentage of completed user profiles
• Overall number of likes and comments
• Interaction levels within teams and groups
• The volume of user-generated content

The ultimate goal of the intranet is to boost efficiency and productivity by giving employees quick access to information they need and helping them do their job efficiently. A good intranet does this by streamlining processes, improving collaboration, automating workflows, tasks, and approvals, and bringing together the parts of your workspace in one place.

Some of the most important productivity metrics are:

• The time needed to complete common tasks
• Time taken to complete intranet tasks
• Number of articles published in a given time
• Readability of intranet content
• Load times of intranet pages

An intranet is a vital component of any modern digital workspace and directly impacts other channels within the organization. For example, intranet-based communication such as socialization platforms helps reduce conversations done through emails. This means the number of sent and received emails is a useful measure.

Intranet provides self-service for users and they can quickly access video tutorials, knowledge articles, troubleshooting guides, and FAQs to resolve their concerns. You can measure metrics like the reduction in the number of customer support tickets and calls in a specific period to get an idea of the intranet's impact. Such data brought together helps understand how intranet impacts other systems within your ecosystem. 

Conclusion

Evaluating the performance and success of your intranet using these metrics and KPIs helps take appropriate measures to boost employee engagement. It also helps map the intranet goals with the results, create and adjust strategies and assess ROI to make continuous improvement and key decisions.