In my previous article, I spoke about the most common value levers that we can measure within an Online Community in order to evaluate what the Community is doing for the business. More often...
Updated 7 months ago
Version 7.0
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TeroRe - Thank you for the comments and observations. Indeed, one of the worst things that can happen when applying this formula is that it does not pass a gut-check with anybody within the business. And what cgrinton mentioned is the biggest red flag of all (i.e. - when the number of deflections due to the power of Community eclipses the number of Support Tickets that the business receives each year).
One quick thing:
* Visits does exclude bots and API calls
Another quick tip to help with credibility:
Visits, by and large, is a good metric to start with. However, if you really want to tighten that metric up, try doing this when you go into Community Analytics:
Community Analytics -> Content -> All Apps -> Forums
You will see that the Visits number grows smaller, the deeper you go into that Community Analytics breadcrumb. Alternatively, if you have a Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB), you can substitute the TKB for 'Forums' in my little tip above.
'Visits' is, IMO, the best metric to use for the formula, but 'best' does not mean 'without flaws'. A number of brand Communities can (perhaps inadvertently so) funnel lots of people to the Community homepage or other pages that should not be counted. There is an immediate bounce once the person realizes they are in place that they have no interest in, but a 'Visit' is still counted.
A brand Community's homepage can sometimes have a critical solution spelled out front-and-center (because the brand realizes how important it is for that solution to get a spotlight), or sometimes it does not. There are just so many varieties, exceptions, and outliers to the minutia of what makes for a useful 'Visit' or not, and where the most valuable content can be found.
Is the great content all across the Community? Is it solely relegated to the conversations threads / topics themselves? The best place to start is with the widest possible top-of-the-funnel Visits count and refine that funnel as necessary depending on the Community's structure and design. The way I refine it, depending on the Community layout, is by using that little narrowing technique in Community Analytics.
As an aside, thank you TeroRe for pointing out Google's new Engaged Sessions metric (although it seems more like a KPI than an actual metric). I like it for a number of reasons, but I am concerned for one specific reason:
For a session to be considered engaged, a visitor has to do one or more of the following:
- Engage actively on your website or mobile app for over 10 seconds.
- Have two or more screen or page views
- Fire a conversion event
If you consider the User Experience when somebody does a Google search, gets a result that leads them directly to a Community page that has their solution, the person digests that solution, and then leaves (happy and satisfied); that whole experience does not "have two or more screen or page views", and thus does not constitute an 'Engaged Session'.
But hey, I still like the spirit of where they're going with this new way of measuring engagement.