5 Important Metrics To Consider When Measuring The Effectiveness Of An Intranet Abhishek Shanbhag July 26, 2017

5 Important Metrics To Consider When Measuring The Effectiveness Of An Intranet

5 Important Metrics To Consider When Measuring The Effectiveness Of An Intranet

In a desperate attempt to increase organizational work productivity and collaboration among employees, C-level executives and IT directors pour a lot of time and money in installing and maintaining an intranet.

But in most cases, business intranets are often under-utilized and are not properly measured in terms of success rates.

Once installed, executives expect an intranet to work wonders for employee engagement and internal communications and think they are going to hit a high ROI.

But this is not the case. Research proves that 40% of intranet initiatives fail due to inadequate adoption.

Unless the business value driven from an intranet is measured from time to time and the intranet is improvised based on the final feedback and reports, organizations cannot realize the full potential of an intranet.

Measuring the effectiveness of your intranet helps not only in understanding which aspects are/aren’t working but also in strategizing the future approach better.

But measuring the effectiveness of the organizational intranet is a tricky job for executives. There are a ton of metrics, statistics, numbers to consider before arriving at a final conclusion.

After working with and observing the functioning of intranets in various Fortune 500 companies, we realized that the following 5 are some of the highly critical metrics to consider when measuring the effectiveness of an intranet.

5 Metrics to Consider When Measuring the Effectiveness of an Intranet for the Maximum Work Productivity:

Usage

With usage metrics, one can easily know how exactly people are using the intranet. It is very important to determine:
  • Which sites are receiving the highest/lowest traffic
  • Average time spent on each site
  • Exit pages and bounce rate in each site

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of visitors who navig away from the page or site without any interactions. The bounce rate of any site/page should be as low as possible. A high bounce rate indicates that users didn’t find the content interesting or information they need.

Exit Page

This is the page where the user session ends or in simple terms, where the user leaves the site. Executives should find all the common exit pages and ensure users are performing the desired action or obtaining the necessary information in the page. At times, a common exit page can be an indication of a broken link or lack of fresh content

Page views

By identifying and analyzing these trends, you can get an overview of which page/content drives more employee engagement and plan your line of action accordingly.

Search

By using search analytics, you can know which keywords are often searched for by users and whether they are able to find the content related to those terms. You can even amplify your content based on the popularity of the keywords, so that users find all the required content hasslefree.

Seek Helps In Measuring The Effectiveness Of Intranet Adoption Within Any Organization

Top Users And Departments

By identifying the most active users and departments on the intranet, you can analyze and recognize which users/departments need help with intranet adoption. Instead of focussing your adoption efforts on the whole company, you can narrow them down to a small set of users or departments who actually need additional training, help or resources.

Peak Times

Depending on the organization’s size, demographics and other related aspects, the usage of an intranet peaks during particular times of a week. By making a note of these time frames, executives can schedule all the important announcements and updates beforehand.

Documents

This is a crucial one. If the organizational intranet is extensively used for document sharing, it is highly imperative to consider this metric. It is essential to keep a track of how many documents are uploaded and downloaded over a particular period of time. The adoption rate of an intranet is directly proportional to the freshness of content in an intranet. A higher document sharing rate indicates fresh content is uploaded/downloaded regularly to/from the intranet.

How To Ease Up The Process?

It is understandable that measuring an intranet success is a tricky job. As mentioned earlier there are a lot of metrics, number and statistics to consider before arriving to a final conclusion. In order to ease up the entire process and help executives take quick and data-driven decisions, we developed a powerful SharePoint analytics solution – Seek. Seek can be deployed for both SharePoint on-premise and SharePoint online and essentially gives a single-window view of all the important trends, data (both historical and present) and customized reports.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.