New metrics to help you grow your community

One reason I’ve been writing about KPIs for online communities is simply the lack of information out there on blogs and websites. And what information there is isn’t always clear. The second reason is simply that organisations want to make the most of their online investment. So my aim is to try and provide a simple framework for measuring and monitoring performance of your community so it delivers results.

The challenge is to turn the elegant theory into practice that can work for everyone who needs to know. So simplicity is the key. As with the example of FARM-Africa often it’s much easier to get going with your social media initiative than it is to measure its success. So how best to deal with that issue? One way is simply to look at what you are already measuring in the way of web stats for which content is most sticky, how many unique visitors you are getting, and average time on site. These visitor metrics used for traditional sites apply to communities too, but there’s also some other categories you’d want to record. Here’s a few that strike me as useful from a post on ‘Metrics for the Busy Community Manager’:

• Visitors Metrics: Such as Unique Visitors, Bounce Rate, Pages per Visit,  Pageviews, Time on Site, Keywords, and Referring Sites
• Members Metrics: Such as New Registrations, # of Active Members, Completed Profiles, Pages per Visit,  Pageviews, and Time on Site
• Contributors Metrics: Such as # of Edits, # of Comments, and # of New User Generated Content
• Evangelists Metrics: Such as # of External Invitations, # of ShareThis external shares, # of Mentions on social media sites (e.g. Twitter)
• Leaders Metrics: Such as # of Active Admins, and # of Active Moderators.

Our community metrics can help you succeed

As the blog post suggests you have a number of ways to gather this data, including a standard web stats package like Google Analytics, internal community stats, and more qualitative means such as surveys and focus groups. The good news is that we now provide internal community stats which record the following core stats, with the option to extend these to suit your needs. Whatsmore you can also create your own custom view of which are the most important stat modules to you, download these all in CSV, and swop in and out individual metrics from one module to another. For example you could add the number of news articles through to the number of pages to the Content section. For an overview of the standard community stats we provide see below:

• Blog metrics: # blogs, # of blog readers, # of blog posters, average # comments per post, average # blog posts per week
• Closed groups: # members, # closed group contributors, # closed group readers
• Content: create your own custom list of stats here
• Discussions: # discussions, # discussion comments, # discussion readers, # discussion posts, # people posting comments, # people posting one comment, average # discussion posts
• Groups: # group members, # groups, # open group members, # open group contributors, # open group readers, average group size
• News article: # news articles, # news comments, # news views
• Page analysis: # pages, # page views in last 3 months
• Polls: # polls, average # poll votes
• Q & A: # Q & A questions, # Q & A answers, # Q & A views
• Search terms: # search terms
• Community members: # registered members, # active members, # your organisation’s members registered.

Of course a list of stats like this on their own are one thing, but the real value only really comes when using them to help you achieve your objectives. I read a blog post last week which helpfully not only listed 100 possible metrics for use with social media, such as online communities, but crucially ends with the following: “It's also just the start of the answer to the broader question: "How do I measure it?" Ultimately, you need to start with figuring out your business objectives and then apply these metrics accordingly.”

So there is the confirmation if it was required that stats are one thing, but to get the most out of them especially for a community they need to start from your objectives.
And from a community development perspective, where you need to be aware of the fact that most visitors are readers but that on the other hand the contributors need positive feedback – it’s a key tool.

Using stats as part of your community objectives

Sometimes it really does pay to work backwards - to ask what success looks like, and then from that create a set of objectives for your community, along with the metrics, and targets to monitor.

So if success looks like a dozen or more new discussions every month, then the objective might be a community which is fully engaged with members; the metric being the number of discussions posts (and reads); the target 12 new discussion posts each month (150 additional reads based roughly on the 90-9-1 rule); with the results reviewed on a 3-monthly basis.

Then at the quarterly review if the targets are not being met action can be taken according to available resources, or if necessary the target reduced to a more realistic level.

Wherever your community management comes from, it's good to measure and review progress on a regular basis. If you don't have the time yourself there's also the option of our Community Healthcheck programme which provides you with a quarterly review of the quality and quantity of community activity on your site.