Advanced Metrics that can be achieved by CardioLog Analytics
The purpose of this article is to introduce a number of unique metrics that can assist you in measuring your SharePoint Portal with more depth than ever before.
Days & Visits to Outcome
Average Visits to Goal Completion: The average number of sessions from first portal interaction to Goal Completion.
Average Days to Goal Completion: Average: The number of days from first portal interaction to Goal Completion.
How can you achieve these goals with CardioLog Analytics? You can set up goals in CardioLog and use the Goal Summary report to view the above metrics. It's necessary to be clear with your goals and what you want to measure. Say you want to measure employee satisfaction, you can utilize CardioLog's Voice of Customer Surveys to gather important data to reach your goals. You can then set these goals up in CardioLog to keep track of how you are monitoring these goals in an organized fashion. By combining Voice of Customer metrics with these intricate Goal Setting metrics, you can have a complete picture of how your portal is performing.
Economic Value
You read correctly. You can in fact use Cardiolog Analytics to measure Economic Value. It is the amount of dollars (or euros, rupees, pounds, etc) in economic value added to your business bottom-line by visitors to your portal. In CardioLog Analytics, you can achieve economic value insights with our Goal Value Reports. By identifying the Macro and Micro conversions in the portal or on a page, you can identify which actions are contributing to the bottom line, and which are taking away from it.
For a public facing SharePoint Site, making a purchase is the obvious macro conversion (and whatever the cost of the product is equals the economic goal value). However, it's quite a bit more difficult to measure the economic value of more micro conversion goals. For example, say your company invests X amount of dollars in a highly specialized document that is available for all of your employees to download. If you only see that 10 out of the 100 persons you employ have downloaded the document, you can easily figure out what money you are losing within your portal investment.
Task Completion Rate
Task completion rate is the percentage of people who come to your portal and answer yes to the question "Were you able to complete the task you set out to do when visiting the portal?" You can use the Voice of Customer and Message Bar tool in CardioLog Analytics to ask questions such as:
- What is the purpose of your visit to our portal today?
- Were you able to complete your task today?
- If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?
By combining task completion questions with primary purpose questions ("Why are you here?") you will have a goldmine of helpful data. Why people come, how much your portal is improving their work flows? No guessing. No making stuff up. No inferring things. Just facts!
Conversion Rate for Social Platforms
Why only measure followers and likes, when you can measure the conversion rate of these actions? For discussions on the portal, you can measure the user comments per post, or the number of replies sent and received per day all under User Activity Reports.
Measure Conversation Rate for Social platforms such as: For blogs: # of reader comments per post. For Discussions: # of replies received per day. If your portal visitors are conversing, find out who they are conversing with. Are they adding value to the portal, and should they be doing it more? Metrics are the first step in your journey to answering all of these vital questions.
You can find these metrics available in CardioLog in the Social Reports for SharePoint 2013, and similar metrics for Sitrion and Yammer.
Visitor Loyalty
Visitor Loyalty is a good metric for enterprise organizations because it gives insights as to whether visitors have a reason to come back, to engage, and to interact. Simply put, Visitor Loyalty is just how many times visitors visit the site within a specified date range. The real foundation for portal success is a large and loyal set of visitors. To constantly improve portal adoption, stake-holders and administrators need to understand who are the loyal visitors and what makes them loyal. Empowering visitors who display loyal behavior can start a chain reaction, thus leveraging these users to motivate others in their networks to jump on the SharePoint train.
Visitor loyalty metrics are great because they measure what's actually important in the portal- repeated frequent visits by an individual. By employing analytics such as Visitor Loyalty, you can get the answer to the question "During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?"
Visitor Recency
How long does it take your users before they decide to come back and visit the portal? Visitor recency can indicate your users' level of engagement with the portal. To measure improvement, it's necessary to make comparisons over time. If your users are revisiting the portal more frequently, you can assume that the content provided on the portal is engaging and helpful to them. Thinking of ways to encourage people to return to the portal is necessary for ensuring portal stability and overall retention rates. The trick is finding ways to tempt users with something to come back for. A series of posts that tell a story, competitions within the portal, frequently updated newsletters, and employee highlights are all great ways to grab user attention and keep them coming back for more.
A Visitor Recency report is the answer to the question "How long has it been since a visitor last visited your portal?" By understanding how long it has been, you can get a birds-eye view into how an individual page is doing in SharePoint. Perhaps you're trying to promote this page, but you have now seen it's been one month since anyone has visited the page. You can then try to attract visitors by creating a button on a home page to redirect visitors to this page more easily. Then you can track after you implement the button how well the page is doing after the changes have been made.
Length of Visit
When your users enter the portal, how long are they staying? It's often difficult to get your users to stay longer on a site, but that should be your ultimate goal. Thinking of creative ways to engage your users can also help you push them to spend more time in the portal. Use links and well thought out anchor text to send them to other pages on the site, and expose them to a variety of content within the portal.
Although a "Length of Visit" metric may seem somewhat basic, it's vital for understanding the individual interactions your users have with the portal pages. During the reporting period, you can find the answer to the question "What is the quality of a visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds?" If your reports show you that the length of a visitor session has increased after you have provided all of your portal users with training, then you can directly show that the training was beneficial.
Depth of Visit
Are your visitors just merely reading the pages of your portal that they specifically need, or are they digging deeper to discover an entire world of content that can be of resource to them? Based upon the goals of your enterprise and it's purpose of using SharePoint, you can first determine what is the target average page view rate. If your goal is to have your users come into your portal and find the relevant information to them as quickly and efficiently as possible, then having a low average page view rate may not be as detrimental to your overall SharePoint success. For many organizations, time is money. Thus, if users seem to be spending too much time and visiting too many pages in the portal because they're not finding the right information they need, then you may need to reassess your strategy.
However, many organizations seek higher average page view rates because that can be indicative that your users are finding interesting information, and are navigating to other pages to seek out more information on the portal. This can be a good sign in terms of increasing user adoption and engagement. It all depends on how you set your goals, and what kind of feedback your're getting from your users. Pairing this report with voice of customer surveys, and on-site search reports can help you attain a holistic view of how accessible your portal is to your users.
A Depth of Visit report answers the questions "During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website?" If you can see the different number of pages a user is accessing within a portal session, you can understand how exactly they're navigating throughout the portal. This is indicative of the kind of experience they're getting out of using the portal. If a user is only accessing one specific page, they may not be aware of the array of other resources and tools available to them in the portal. You can then use this opportunity to see what types of training sessions would be useful for your users to get more out of the portal.
Recognition
How frequently are employees recognized for their contributions? Who are the top influencers in the organization? CardioLog Analytics provides numerous reports that can help you with recognition metrics in the portal. These metrics can be achieved with our social reports such as Influential Users (in all platforms), Praised Users (in Yammer) and Expert Users (in Sitrion).
Growth and Learning
How long does it take a new employee to get up to speed with collaborative tools? What is the frequency of questions being answered? The metrics to answer these questions can be achieved in CardioLog with our Portal Growth reports such as Content Contributors, Content Contributions, Avg. Contributions per User, Portal Growth, and our social reports for all platforms such as Communities Activity, Users Activity, andGroups Activity (to see contributions). Specifically in Sitrion there is also a have Most Popular Questions report, which can give insights into how users are using the portal to grow, learn, and interact.
Innovation
How long do ideas take to move forward in the portal? How many ideas or suggestions are being contributed? These metrics can be actualized in CardioLog for Sitrion with "Most Popular Ideas" Reports. Ultimately, the portal can serve not only as a day to day task solution, but also as a community for inspiring, motivating, and catalyzing some of the best ideas to come in the enterprise.