Continuing on from an earlier post introducing some terminology around how to measure engagement within apps and sites, I’d like to continue with introducing a very basic framework for determining what to measure and considering how to display those measurements.

Let’s take a look at each of these four components:

Goals

You need clear goals to help you choose the right metrics. You really can’t start with the things you want to measure; you should select the things you want to measure based on any of these goals. We’ve got five categories… and they all interrelate:

Let’s look at some sample goals for a company’s intranet called ‘myCorptown’ across these different categories:

Adoption

1. Ensure new employees and new users are engaging with myCorptown content for the first time, including the email newsletter
2. Build employee buy-in by telling our story through our vehicles
3. Reach our employees ‘where they are’ including via mobile and kiosks
4. ‘Give them what they want’ by being able to respond to the popularity of content
5. Get our employees to think of going to myCorptown first for company information

Engagement

1. Get our employees to give feedback on content including likes and comments, submitting questions, etc.
2. Have our employees be conversant in an informed manner about company news with fellow colleagues
3. Get our executive team to choose myCorptown as their communication vehicle
4. Get our employees to help each other (employees as communicators)

Retention

1. Get our users to return to myCorptown more often (more than 1x per week)
2. Encourage our lapsed users to return to myCorptown
3. Reduce stale content in areas on myCorptown where dynamic content is expected by our users

Task Success

1. ‘Give them what they need’ in addition to what our users want, including via search
2. Solve our users’ problems via self-service where possible (without a help desk call)

Happiness

1. Ensure our employees are able to articulate the company story…
   • What we stand for
   • How does my work fit into the story
   • How does my work touch consumers
2. Support a more transparent culture at the company
3. Decrease frustration during activities on myCorptown
4. Support our employees through times of change

Signals

Eventually, we want to think about mapping goals to lower-level signals which are things we might want to consider monitoring. These signals are what we might be able to pay attention to over time in order to determine progress toward or to what degree we’ve fallen short of our goals.

Here are some of the example goals and the signals that could be identified for them:

Metrics

Based on our signals, we’ll decide on things to measure… the metrics… like the number of home page views and the site’s bounce rate.

The measurements themselves are the key to everything, but rarely do we want to take the actual metrics and present them for interpretation by themselves; we need to provide some context and a story around the measurement. Just installing a web analytics tool, turning it on, and looking at digits tick up will not lead to any understanding around your goals.

KPIs

This is where we get into how to display the metrics that have been chosen to track the signals and tell a story about our goal, and I’ll present a few varieties again using examples from above.

Trends

Here’s one that is a simple indication of home page stickiness with trending:

Here’s another example with trending showing off-hours visits:

Trends w/History

Here we have an example of displaying a trend over time, bringing history into the context:

Here’s another example of trending with history showing submitted questions:

Snapshots

These next two examples are presented in different ways, one simpler visually and the other with more context; they provide the same data in a snapshot for a specific window of time.

Here’s another example of snapshotting and two different ways of presenting the data. Note these example visualizations include a metric that is abstracted (into three different categories):

Hopefully this series of examples gives you some ideas for how to think about showing what’s being generated from all your data! More important though you should have a better understanding of how to approach deciding what to measure based on what matters to track according to the goals you have for your site or app.

I find a lot of confusion out there when it comes to conversations about analytics for websites and applications. Here’s a brief primer for how to use the right terms in your discussion…

Metrics

A metric is a something that can be
measured based on quantifiable data,
or at the very least,
estimated based on anecdotal data.

An example of a metric could be your heart rate or blood pressure taken by your doctor at a specific visit.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A key performance indicator (KPI) is
a visual indicator that tells a story
about one or more measurements, in context.

An example of a KPI could be the trend of your heart rate or blood pressure over a certain period of time. If the trend is upward, an up arrow might be used with the percentage of increase over that time period. It might be colored red if the implication is negative.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the
measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting
of web data for purposes of
understanding and optimizing web usage.

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics mainly provide metrics for consumption via reports and APIs. What they usually don’t do is put them together in a nice PowerPoint deck to present to your boss!

Web analytics tools may already provide some KPIs in dashboards. These are more sexy and ripe for executive consumption. However, most practical KPIs are usually either:

• Formulated automatically via additional software that process the metrics via APIs
• Manually compiled by a site administrator

This is because most businesses want to answer very specific questions and monitor custom KPIs that aren’t readily available as an include with a tool.