How to leverage Intranet Analytics to measure Intranet Effectiveness

The purpose of Intranet portals is to facilitate effective internal communications in order to help employees become more efficient.

An organization’s intranet has a direct impact on its revenue in today’s digital workplace. Back in 2001, analysts used to compare intranets with telephony and described the efficiency of the technology as so obvious that it did not require any ROI calculation.

But today, measuring intranet effectiveness is crucial to its success.

Intranet success depends on the ROI generated. It’s easy to understand the value of improved communications and better employee engagement in the workplace. But how do you actually tie a dollar value to it?

Why Measure Intranet Effectiveness?

Organizations try really hard to implement new intranet platforms.

Intranet management teams work under tight budget limitations and spend several hours to collect insights.

It is crucial to measure the effectiveness of an intranet by interpreting usage analytics to understand what’s working and what isn’t and plan a future-proof strategy for long-term success.

Measuring Intranet effectiveness can provide insights that help organizations:

• Make effective decisions to enhance your intranet, directly down to the page level
• Enhance intranet content and improve internal communications
• Engage employees to ensure effective utilization of intranet and enhance intranet personalization.
• Demonstrate the success of intranet in the organization, which can reflect ROI and develop a business case for improvement.
• Drive a procedure and culture of innovation which improves intranet adoption.
• Deliver strategic benefits and have a deeper understanding of the workforce

Extracting insights using intranet analytics tool can help in measuring intranet performance and making decisions about further steps, in order to foster a more engaging and effective intranet.

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

Approaches to Intranet Analytics Best Practices

The impact of SharePoint – 2016 by AIIM shows that 85% of respondents use SharePoint as their intranet platform and 92% made it their major collaboration tool hosting employees’ workplaces and corporate team sites.

Large firms or organizations plan to invest in technologies like SharePoint/Office 365. However, choosing good platforms alone is not enough to get you back in the game. On the other hand, organizations often fail to utilize technology platforms to the fullest, which may have an adverse impact on both employee engagement and business productivity.

A successful intranet portal needs a constant upgrade to make sure that it is functioning as a modern collaborative workplace for employees. Every organisation has its own expectations from an intranet, which are aligned to their company goals and objectives. It is recommended that these needs are considered to ensure an effective utilization of intranet analytics.

Despite the fact that analytics should be at the core of any organization’s intranet strategy, many organizations are still struggling to measure intranet effectiveness and claim intranet success.

Here are a few actionable intranet analytics best practices that can help you achieve intranet success:

Measure before, after and in between

Analytics help identifies the current status of the intranet performance – it shows you whether it is improving, deteriorating or coming to a standstill.

With any intranet, it is important to measure both before and after major changes have been made. For example, if an organization is going to migrate to a new intranet platform, it is recommended that you measure the old intranet performance before migration. You can then compare the impact of new intranet vs old intranet and evaluate collaboration levels before and after migration. Measuring during and after the migration is necessary to track and compare performance before and after the activity and set benchmarks for success.

Get the right mix of metrics

Don’t focus only on a single set of metrics. Using a variety of metrics can provide important insights into performance and steps you can take to improve.

Assign the right amount of effort

Measuring intranet is not the only task for intranet management teams – there are other similarly important tasks and activities in the everyday management of an intranet.

Instead of spending too much time mapping intranet design, updating documents, posting important content etc., rethink core activities and assign a significant amount of effort to measuring intranet analytics frequently, based on the level of resourcing.

Add stories, analysis and context

Including stories, analysis and context to an intranet report and displaying it on the intranet dashboard will offer a complete view of what’s going on with your intranet.

Look for new trends

You can have better business goals or objectives by observing latest trends. Leverage a variety of metrics to analyze, identify and implement new trends.

Map back to intranet strategy

Mapping analytics to the intranet strategy and related business objectives is a good way to identify if the intranet is contributing effectively to achieving business outcomes. Likewise, you can also identify areas which are currently ineffective and not producing desired results.

Act on what you measure

Intranet analytics should provide suggestions, interventions and actions to help you make decisions to improve intranet adoption rate. It is essential to follow up on what you measure. Otherwise, there is no value for insights gained from analytics.

Record general surveys on measurements and related activities as a part of review process. Your intranet analytics will then deliver real value.

Why Intranet Analytics Tools Are Required To Measure Effectiveness

A great deal of effort goes into building intranets, but do you know if it is actually effective? Several areas of an intranet can be enhanced using intranet analytics to boost intranet adoption rates. Here are a few areas to measure your intranet effectiveness:

Usage and Visits

Intranet teams should focus on how many visitors are approaching the intranet? How long do they spend on the intranet? Which content are they spending time on? Typically, these analyses are generated by dashboards that are integrated into CMS. However, organizations can use an intranet analytics tool to measure how effectively the intranet is performing.

A good analytical dashboard will drill into detail and revealing insights about the percentage of the workforce who are accessing and reading the content on the intranet.

Here are some sample usage metrics:

• The number of unique visitors.
• Intranet reach (percentage of your employees who are accessing the intranet).
• An overall number of pages visited.
• An average number of pages visited.
• Types of devices used to access the intranet.
• Locations from which users access the intranet.
• Average time spent on the site.
• Bounce rates.
• Referral sites.

Employee Satisfaction

Depending only on analytics of page visits, usage rates and reach is risky because it does not give deeper insights into how engaged or satisfied employees are. Measuring usage rates alone won’t give you a clear indication of how satisfied employees are with the intranet.

You have to also consider questions such as:

• What are their pain points?
• What features are they expecting?
• What is working well?

Measuring employee satisfaction also helps engage employees and raise the intranet adoption rate.

For example, visits to a certain site may be high because they need a critical piece of information but that does not mean it is working well. Employees may actually feel unhappy with the way information is presented.

Organizations should run frequent surveys on intranet satisfaction, based on which the intranet can be enhanced to meet employee needs and provide them with an engaging experience.

Here are a few sample employee satisfaction metrics:

• Overall satisfaction with the intranet
• Satisfaction rates with different areas or aspects of the intranet
• Rates of awareness of features
• Most liked and least liked features
• Ratings of ease of use on mobile devices.

Employee Engagement

Employees might be accessing and viewing intranet content, but are they effectively engaged with the intranet? Social intranets are a dynamic and intuitive platform which have revolutionized the way your employees interact and perform.

Employee interaction levels are directly connected to employee engagement. Measuring interactions on your intranet can show individual employee engagement with intranet content. High levels of interaction indicate that the organization is a well-connected network of engaged employees.

Here are some sample employee engagement metrics:

• The overall percentage of active participants.
• Employee participation rates.
• An overall number of likes, shares, comments and ratings.
• Individual content engagement (likes, shares, comments and ratings).
• Levels of interaction within communities or sites.
• Percentage of employee profiles completed.

Efficiency and productivity

Intranet efficiency depends on how intuitive your intranet is and how quickly employees can find the information they need.

Intranets are primarily about getting things done, completing tasks and improving processes to increase efficiency and enhance productivity.

The best intranets enable employees to get work done faster and with greater efficiency. It empowers them to find information quickly, accelerates internal processes and fosters collaboration among employees. Ultimately this leads to reduced time and costs, and increased productivity.

Saving time is a good sign of an increase in efficiency and productivity. You can express time and productivity savings in different ways. For example, minutes saved per day per employee, total days saved or an estimate of cost savings and extra minutes available for a workforce to perform better and increase efficiency.

Here are some sample efficiency metrics:

• Time taken to successfully complete intranet-related tasks.
• A success rate of completion of intranet-related tasks.
• Time needed to complete common tasks.
• A number of articles published in a given period.
• The number of articles reviewed.
• Readability of content.
• Percentage of forms that are now completed online instead of on paper.
• Load times for the intranet homepage and other pages.

Impact on Other Channels

An intranet is an integral part of a modern digital workplace. Intranet strategy can have a direct impact on other channels. For example, organisations want to reduce conversations through emails. Intranet-based communications like socializing platforms can help reduce the number of emails conversations. Therefore, the number of emails sent and received can be an important measure.

One of the key benefits of an intranet is that it is accessible from any location at any time. It also provides self-service which adds real value to an organization’s IT helpdesk and HR. A self-service approach is usually a specific aim of these support services. If there is a reduction in the support calls or service tickets to IT helpdesk or a specific rise in the use of an application, then you can see that the intranet has had a positive impact on the organization.

You may consider Acuvate’s MeshBot, an intranet bot that is always connected to your intranet, brings you the latest news, finds required documents, gives timely updates, automates and streamlines mundane, labour-intensive tasks provides self-service options and can assist employees 24×7.

Here are a few sample metrics that can help you assess the intranet’s impact on other channels:

• A number of emails sent and received.
• The number of emails sent at the department level.
• The number of calls or queries to the HR service desk.
• The number of calls or tickets to the IT helpdesk.
• Level of usage of individual systems.

Organisational KPIs

An intranet is another means of achieving your organization’s goals and objectives. If you can define KPIs in your intranet strategy and also the related approaches to measurement, it can give you a great foundation for demonstrating the intranet’s strategic contributions. Those measures can also be used as the basis for a business case for a bigger intranet budget.

The contribution of the intranet to various strategic goals can vary. When reporting, you can show overall broader KPI, but also more specific stats that are more directly attributable to the intranet.

Here are a few organisational KPI metrics:

• Level of employee engagement
• Internal communications
• Overall time saved over a certain period of time
• Overall costs saved over a certain period of time
• Time taken to respond to customer inquiries

Intranet analytics does not come with a hard and fast set of rules. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to measure the effectiveness of intranet, because there are different factors to consider, such as features, needs, employees, departments and organizations size etc.

Is your intranet content up to date? Are employees engaged with the available resources on an intranet? Get deep insights about your intranet with Acuvate’s SharePoint analytics tool Seek. Measure your intranet effectiveness, analyze your Intranet adoption rate and increase employee engagement across the organization.