Its time to acknowledge that metrics matter both behind and in front of the firewall.
Keep It Simple Stupid is an expression almost as dear to me as the goal of Simple, Elegant, Intuitive, Fast - and when it comes to metrics about intranet usage we all should have a lot more simplicity in our lives.
Whilst no ecommerce site would leave home without a metrics and analysis suite, when it comes to many intranets around the world, usage metrics are simply nowhere to be found.
Of course there is server monitoring to make sure that the server is alive courtesy of our IT friends, but often little attention is paid to whether people actually use the content, and what content they actually use. In part this is because the major analytics packages are designed for ecommerce and internet sites where click analytics mean money, with the result being that the stats packages tend to be very powerful and designed for use by an analyst rather than by the content owner. There are some excellent web traffic analysis tools available, ranging from the free Google Analytics, to hosted approaches like Click Density, through to packages like Webtrends and Omniture. Whilst we are big fans of Gooogle Analytics and Click
Density for public websites, security and risk concerns about sending intranet usage traffic outside the firewall often tend to rule them out for intranet use.
In an intranet context, where the strategic goal is to have only that content which is organisationally valuable arranged in a way that is easily found, usage metrics are equally important. From a knowledge management perspective, we want to know how many times a given piece of content is visited, where people came from, what links were clicked on the page, and what sort of distribution of use we are achieving. Is the 4 clicks per day just one person who happens to be the content owner……
Now, in line with keeping it simple, metrics are not helpful if they are just telling us how many hits have been received. “This page has been accessed 54,000 times since 2 June 2007″. Yikes, is that a good number or a bad number? We need to do mental math to work out what that means.
Surely the computer can do the maths for us to tell us something more useful in a framework we can understand - perhaps 34 views per day, 170 views per week and 680 view per month?
When we have the data presented like that we can quickly consider what level of daily traffic we would expect for the content item, and then get a sense of whether we are seeing the right levels and take appropriate action. In some cases it may signal more education is required, or the content is too difficult to find - but at least it can start activity to address the situation and make the intranet more relevant.
But wait.
If we now have the click traffic by person (with privacy protected), that means we can easily also retrieve the top 20 sites visited by the current user - that might be useful as well to place on an intranet home page perhaps - personalised, updated most valued links? Keeping it simple?
Now the good news.
To help you capture and share metrics for your intranet we have created MPAStats, available either as a Sharepoint webpart or as an html snippet which can be inserted into intranet pages. It is designed as a footer which sits happily at the bottom of the page, tracking activity, and displaying aggregate and detail stats with an ajax enabled click of a “More” link at the bottom of the page. All of the click data is stored in a database, which means you can still have an analyst easily produce customised reports and analysis.
Stats sit as a footer at the bottom of each intranet page in an expanding panel. Click the More link and analysed details of how people got to the current page, and what they clicked are displayed for easy review.
If you are considering remodelling your intranet or perhaps moving to Sharepoint, add MPAStats to your current site for a couple of weeks and then your discussions about your new intranet can be grounded in actual data rather than what people “think might be important”.
Starting at just USD3,000 you no longer need to continue to fly blind on usage of your intranet. Of course, if you want to arm an analyst with a fully functioned analytic engine in addition to providing in page feedback, then you might want to acquire a Webtrends or equivalent in addition to MPAStats. We’ve found that for intranets, data collected by the MPAStats is more than sufficient to support better strategic decision making on intranet content management.
Of course, there are other ways and tools one can use to retrieve usage stats from Sharepoint (CardioLog and Ontolica spring to mind). These tools tend to be focused on Administrators and Analysts, and take a different approach to sharing the data, where we place a premium on simple, in-page numbers at an attractive price point. Where detailed stats are required, running the tools in parallel might make sense. The price, processor, storage and bandwidth requirements of our web part are very low by comparison to running even the most basic Sharepoint infrastructure and our approach can be used to analyse non-Sharepoint infrastructure as well.
From a Data Protection perspective (important for those with operations in Europe), giving content owners access to the raw data may actually make available an inappropriate level of person-specific details. Our approach obfuscates the details of individual users (displaying “Person A”, “Person B”, etc), while providing transparent access for everybody.
So, the thought for the day. Bring some reality and some management to your intranet life with MPAStats, visible at the bottom of every page, kept simple, and helping you progress to a more business focused intranet.
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