Development Seed Blog

Google Analytics
and other outside-your-web-community metrics tools allow you to see
useful stats about visitors to your website. You can see amount of time
spent on your site, return visitors, total page views, what pages are
being viewed, where people enter your site and from where, what page
they leave from, from where in the world they view your page, what
browser, etc. You can do a lot with these stats, like make more with
Google AdWords, for example. What about what’s happening inside your
site?

There is a lot to measure within a community site. Some of
the important metrics depend on what your site does. For example, if
your community is a software development community, stats and listings
on outstanding bug reports, feature requests, and open issue tickets
can be important. Taking this same data and plotting it over time to
see the average length of an open issue report could be helpful for
measuring and setting goals.

What if your site is a news site?
People read your news site differently; Some folks read your news
directly on your website, others via RSS, others maybe in their email
via a subscriptions service. External analytics can take care of which
news stories are most popular. But look at your subscriptions module.
What can people subscribe to via email? Maybe they can subscribe to a
user’s blog, or a category in a classifieds listing, or a category from
some other type of content on your site. These are metrics you can
track within your community. Maybe the results will tell you folks are
interested in stories on education or schools and not on crime and
violence; hire another education reporter or direct your current staff
to find and write more stories on crime prevention in education…I don’t
know, I’ve never run a newspaper, but the point is your stats are
telling you to do or not do something to get positive results.

Do
the visitors to your site need to login to your site to do something?
You better be getting the most out of analyzing their visit if you make
them login. When a user logs in, what do they do? A lot of community
sites log these behaviors. External analyzers can tell you where they
go and maybe what they do, but you should be able to see all this in
your site. An overview showing latest users to login and their
task-flow within the site, as well as an overview explaining long term
patterns. What can you do with these stats? It depends on the purpose
of your site.

Other user activities on your site which might not
be nicely measured for site admins could be internal search on the
site. It would be nice to know what users are searching for on your
site; Maybe it is something obvious but is not placed well in the
navigation. Perhaps users are searching for something you do not have
but should.  Take a look at these two charts which shows the top
tier of internal searches run on NextBillion.net
during a two week period, listed in order by the frequency of the
search query (not the number of results).  Though, you could map
the number of results for each query as well, which could show you what
people are looking for any which you do or do not have.  The first
chart is for general searches within the site, the second is searches
run on the NextBillion.net Activity Database.

If
you are running a specific campaign perhaps there are metrics specific
to that campaign which you should track.  Take the SaveRoe.com Target Photo campaign
as an example.  Supporters were asked to send in their Target
photos.  Take a look at this chart on the influx of photos
submitted to the site.    Two spikes are clear - perhaps associated
with an emailing.  Perhaps more important are the low points -
particularly during the weekends, then the drop off during the
holidays.  If a tell a friend tool was associated with this
campaign, and click through tracking was active, you could measure the
virality of the campaign's spread.  How many folks who submitted
pictures were directly contacte by Planned Parenthood versus how many
were contacted via a tell a friend tool?

There’s a lot to
measure from the inside of your site. If you look at a web platform
like Drupal, many of the activities are logged, but not as many are
sensibly reported to admins as they could or should be.  We wil
follow up with a post on some modules in Drupal and perhaps other tools
that can help with community site metrics.