We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

Report Highlights
Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

• In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
• The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
• There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

Determining What to Measure
From Question 14: How does your organization determine what is important to measure and report?

SUMMARY:

• 20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
• 61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
• 19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

TAKEAWAY:
Respondents are primarily shaping metrics strategies based on business goals (61%), even if their platform doesn’t support gathering or tracking desired metrics. Platform metrics are generally speaking, not comprehensive or extensible enough to create a meaningful dashboard to see overall community health, get an accurate visualization of the community’s social graph, and to understand the ongoing insight created by and the sentiments of the community population. The risk in relying only on data that a platform can provide (20% of the respondents) is that the data sets aren’t comprehensive or contextual to organization’s needs. “Measuring everything” (19% of respondents) can overwhelm the community team and stakeholders, and is unlikely to yield meaningful performance data or insight without some rigor in the analysis.

Metrics Currently Being Tracked
From Question 16: What do you currently measure?

SUMMARY:
The top 5 items that online communities measure for tracking and reporting are as follows:

• 152 Responses – Unique Visitors
• 150 Responses – New Member Registrations
• 143 Responses – Page Views
• 126 Responses – Visitors
• 116 Responses – Message Posts

The top 5 items that online communities don’t measure, but want to are as follows:

• 90 Responses – Member Satisfaction
• 90 Responses – Influencer / Evangelism
• 84 Responses – Member Life Cycle
• 83 Responses – Member Loyalty
• 73 Responses – Referrals to Community

TAKEAWAY:
The top 5 items that online communities currently measure for tracking and reporting are the same for both profit and non-profit organizations and include Unique Visitors, New Member Registrations, Page Views, Visitors and Message Posts.

Non-profit organizations concentrate on measuring Podcasts & Video Links and Member Satisfaction, more often than other organizations, whereas commercial organizations place more attention on measuring Retention / Attrition, Member Loyalty, Member Blog Posts and Conversion than non-profit organizations.

As organization’s community strategies mature, the trend to primarily report on basic web metrics (page views, registrations) will be replaced by metrics that speak to the health of the community, the strength of members’ networks, the quality and type of member participation, and more robust measurements of member engagement. The data suggest that we are on the cusp of the evolution from “basic” community metrics to more robust and contextual reporting.

Currently Measuring – Profit and Non Profit


A larger version of the graph can be downloaded here:
http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png

Top 3 Key Performance Indicators

From Question 19: What are the 3 most important community key performance indicators in the reports you send to management?

SUMMARY:

• 32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
• 21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
• 18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
• 5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
• 4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
• 4% (10) Sales Revenue – Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
• 4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
• 3% (6) Number of Downloads
• 3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
• 2% (5) Visitor Retention
• 2% (5) Number of Conversions
• 1% (2) Donations Received
• 1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal

TAKEAWAY:
Almost a third of respondents indicated that User Activity / Engagement (32%) is one of the most important key performance indicators in the reports that they sent to management. Within the User Activity / Engagement category, the following 3 key performance indicators were the most commonly reported:
• 33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
• 22 Number of Site Visits
• 19 Number of Unique Visits

The other two key performance indicators that many respondents input into management reports are Membership Count (21%) (including new membership and total membership count) and the Number of Posts / Comments (18%) received on their site.

User Activity / Engagement is the number one item to track for both profit and non-profit organizations. Within this category the specific key performance indicators were dispersed similarly, with the profit based organizations having a slightly higher percentage ratio on key performances such as the Number of Threads reported and General Participation. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, have a slightly higher percentage ratio on reporting metrics such as Number of Returning Visitors and the Number of Site Visits.

Another common response from profit based organizations was related to reporting key performances such as Sales Revenue and the Number of Conversions whereas non-profit organizations had a higher percentage response rate for reporting the amount of Donations Received.



USER ACTIVITY / ENGAGEMENT 34% (BROKEN OUT):


Access to the Full Report
For members of the Online Community Research Network, the report is included as a benefit of your annual subscription. If you are interested in joining the OCRN, or learning more about the Network’s activities, please go here.

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009 report is also available for purchase for $295.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2009/09/online-communities-metrics-and-reporting-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/06/online-community-roi-and-revenue-techniques/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/06/online-community-roi-and-revenue-techniques/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:17:30 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=360 We just released (for a limited time) the Online Community Revenue and ROI Techniques research report.

The study was conducted last fall as part of the Online Community Research Network, and explored issues around driving revenue via online communities.

I’ve included highlights below. I would encourage you to download the report for the full result set.

Question: Based on your experience, what are the most effective strategies and tactics for generating revenue from an online community?

Summary:
Respondents highlighted several common themes, including:

The need for Advertising:
“Provide a platform for peer-to-peer interaction that advertisers can participate in. By ensuring that advertising content is relevant to the content the community is generating (through tools like contextual matching), we’ve seen high ROI for advertising partners for
branding and lead generation campaigns.”

The need for Subscriptions:
“In our context (most-valued content available only to paying subscribers), we provide high-quality community features ‘including access to experts’ as a privilege of subscribership.”

The fact that Advertising and Subscription are the leading strategies isn’t surprising, given that the model was pioneered with content-based sites. Several respondents mentioned that revenue generation from communities was indirect, particularly with regard to brand affinity and advertising.

Categorized write in answers follow -

Advertising:

• “Ad impressions – both visit duration and repeat visitors.”
• “Ad placement has resulted in game downloads from our casual games forums.”
• “Advertising on member content.”
• “Advertising sponsorships.”
• “Identifying quality community connections to leverage for advertising targeting insights.”
• “Provide a platform for peer-to-peer interaction that advertisers can participate in. By ensuring that advertising content is relevant to the content the community is generating (through tools like contextual matching), we’ve seen high ROI for advertising partners for branding and lead generation campaigns.”
• “Thought leadership, lead generation, customer retention are top indirect revenue sources. Customer councils, ad revenue and member dues are the most frequent direct sources.”

Advertising, Brand Loyalty, and Upgrade Program:

• “Unfortunately, a lot of revenue generated through business communities is indirect. Brand loyalty, hyper-affiliation, user acquisition are all difficult to translate into real dollars – although some companies try. Advertising is probably still the most effective way to monetize a community though – and the more targeted the ads, the better. For instance, having an “upgrade now” button on the forums for an outdated device, etc. A while ago, we piloted an upgrade program through the dell community that was quite successful.”
• “From our viewpoint, it’s really a matter of having a more engaged readership. We’re strictly an ad business at this point, and getting more people to come back to the site more often and see more pages is only good for us.”

Brand Loyalty:

• “Clients need to appreciate indirect value of promotion, brand awareness, and loyalty. We work with many of our clients to develop their platforms in a way that the software itself could be resold/white labeled for resale.”

Subscriptions & Brand Loyalty:

• “Allow a big upsell jump. A super-premium level allows people to express their loyalty even if the benefits are almost the same as at the next level.”

Subscriptions:

• “In our context (most-valued content available only to paying subscribers), provide high-quality community features, including access to experts, as a privilege of membership/subscribership.”
• “Providing a base platform for free, and charging for a premium version.’
• “Where the revenue is part of a premium service, as a cost of obtaining value from the community or directly tied to the identity and ego of the community member. For example, some kind of payment to access premium content or tools to take better advantage of the social space. Identity creation is a powerful motivator to which money is a means, not a barrier.”

Sponsors:

“Incite users to create valuable content that can be sponsored by interested parties.”

“We have not succeeded in having individuals pay directly; we have had more success in getting supporting institutions to pay for their employees’ access.”

Create a Strong Community:

• “I do not believe you should be doing community to generate revenue. Our objective is to provide customers/users a way to Learn, Share, and Explore Technology.”
• “The communities don’t generate revenue. They provide us a ‘lock-in’ to using our service by showing the value of the “network effect” on our platform. They provide a richer user experience for clients’ members and therefore providing greater support during contract renewal negotiations.’
• “Create a strong community, then monetize the activity, versus monetizing the capabilities early on.”
• “Our focus is not on generating revenue directly. We focus on enabling community participants to develop solutions, find answers, and gain knowledge.”

Question: What advice would you have for a colleague that needs to introduce revenue generating activities to their online community?

Summary:
Recommendations varied from the respondents, but several themes emerged from the content:

• Understand Your Community: Know what your community values, and what they expect from you. Let your community guide you on what they value, what they will pay for, and what types of advertising they will tolerate.
• Add More Features/Value: Don’t put roadblocks in front of features that are necessary for a healthy community. Think of value-added services that compliment the core community feature set.
• Be Careful: Your community is a delicate ecosystem. Make sure you don’t abuse it.
• Combine Revenue Sources: which techniques like “Target Advertising” and “Premium Upselling.”
• Quality over Quality: Focus on a few effective revenue streams rather than several moderately effective ones. 1 well placed ad vs. 7 throughout the interface.

Again, if you would like to see the full report, I would encourage you to download it here.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/06/online-community-roi-and-revenue-techniques/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/03/online-community-roi-models-and-reporting/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/03/online-community-roi-models-and-reporting/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:35:15 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=336 Research about online community building and growth is central to the mission of Forum One Networks. The Online Community Research Network studies and publishes 6 times a year on topics that matter to those responsible for guiding online community and social media activities in their organization.

The Online Community ROI Models and Reporting research study was initiated in February of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate further into the ROI research that we conducted in the last half of 2007, and to gain insight into specifically how organizations were valuing and reporting on their online communities activities. Further, we wanted to gain insight into who the stakeholders were for ROI metrics, and how the reports were being received.

I will be blogging highlights of the report over the next few weeks. To obtain a full copy, as well as access to all of our other research, and the professional network of online community pros, please consider joining the Online Community Research Network.

We received approximately 150 completed surveys. Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

Q16: Which of the following quantitative and qualitative metrics are critical for communication ROI at your organization? (question 16 from the study)
The top-ranking metrics are: Traffic patterns & statistics; Community member engagement; Unique number of visitors; New Member Registrations; Member Satisfaction; and Product Feedback / R&D ideation.

The middle-ranking metrics are: Number of referrals to the community by members; WOM generated by community; transition of lurkers into active community members; impact of the community on revenue; organization or brand-mentions on other sites; and ratio of comments per post.

When looking at the data segmented by type of respondent organization, Traffic patterns, member engagement and unique community visitors scored consistently high.

Top-ranking Metrics


Middle-ranking Metrics


Lower-ranking Metrics



Q23: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate?

This question was intended to solicit the “elevator pitch” stats or metrics that community managers and strategists use internally to their organization to evangelize community and social media efforts. Answers ranged from the unique ability of online communities to create value to cost reduction of existing communication channels and corporate functions.

These were all write in answers. The main themes are as follows, with selected quotes inline below. (full report contains all write in data).

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money:
   • “Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support.”
   • “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.”
   • “Using WebBoard is more efficient then email, telephones or fax. It saves us time and money and increases our ability to service the consumers in our sector.”
   • “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” [Thus saving our organization time and money.]
2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest:
   • “Expanded resources & knowledge for specific areas of interest and centralized resources.”
   • “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.”
   • “You won’t find this content anywhere else – written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.”
3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us:
   • “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.”
   • “Our members consume 49% more average page views per session every month than non-members.”
   • “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.”
   • “Our forum generates more page views than the site itself.”
   • “Our community traffic by far exceeds traffic to all traditional product areas.”
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
   • “Our programs on average engage participants for 45 minutes each time they visit.”
   • “Time spent on the site is higher on forums pages than anywhere else on the site, indicating that community members are more engaged.”
   • “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.”
   • “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.”
   • “Our social media content generates more content and discussions off site, increasing our reach.”
   • “The ability of our blogs to drive customer engagement and PR activity.”
4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community:
   • “Ideas for our books.”
   • “It’s all about what we learn from the developers through our community interactions.”
   • “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.”
   • “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.”
   • “We have been able to gather more than a thousand best practices/lessons learned in two years use.”
5. Lead Generation / Conversion:
   • “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.”
   • “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.”
   • “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.”
6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site:
   • “In our Sourcing Professional Forum, procurement professionals are constantly sharing templates and best practices across organizations, bootstrapping their RFP effort, saving time and increasing value.”
   • “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.”
   • “The National Board of Certified Teachers can share best teaching practices with ease never before possible.”
   • “In our premium areas, customers are using online training and certification to manage global implementations, knocking down traditional barriers to skill building in an online, social learning setting.”
   • “Our users have access to every single college coach in the country. This is something no other site offers. Our site is always free to the users and they will never be charged. All of our competitors charge users to use their recruiting website.”
   • “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.”
7. Build customer loyalty:
   • “Anecdotal stories of knowledge sharing, connections made for business purposes and special access created through connecting members.”
   • “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.”
   • “Employees who belong to the community almost never ‘turn over’. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.”
   • “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.”
   • “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.”
   • “If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities.”
   • “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.”
   • “Our community has one of the highest net promoter scores for our brand of any corporate offering.”
   • “Our members say that they like the site and related services – direct comprehension of value, esp. during account meetings.”
   • “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.”
   • “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don’t hesitate to tell us what they like, and don’t like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.”
   • “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.”
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
8. Online community is growing our membership base:
   • “In a climate where professional associations, and especially manufacturer associations, have struggled to maintain members, we have consistently and significantly increased in membership year-over-year for the past 5 years. This growth directly coincides with our implementation of online community services. Over 85% of our members find our member-only e-mail discussion groups alone to be worth the price of annual membership.”
   • “95% of our members would recommend membership in our online community to other parents raising children with food allergies.”
   • “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.”
   • “We boast membership in 125+ countries.”
   • “We have 8000 registered members across 95% of local authorities.”
   • “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company’s upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”
   • “We have the largest active user community in the marketplace.”

Again, to get access to the full report, as well as other research and the professional online community network, please check out the OCRN site.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2008/03/online-community-roi-models-and-reporting/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/11/online-community-roi-2007-report-released/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/11/online-community-roi-2007-report-released/#comments Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:36:13 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=275 We publicly released the Online Community ROI report last week. The research project was conducted as part of the Online Community Research Network agenda, and was initially released to OCRN members in May. The study had many interesting findings, including:
• Only 22% of respondents could clearly articulate ROI on community efforts
• The majority of respondents gave a high priority to establishing an ROI model in the near term
• 49% were reporting some dimensions of value back to management on a monthly basis
• “Value” of online community efforts are contextual to an organizations goals and objectives

Download the full report here, free of charge.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/11/online-community-roi-2007-report-released/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/09/online-community-roi-reporting-on-dimensions-of-value/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/09/online-community-roi-reporting-on-dimensions-of-value/#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:17:23 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=242 We conducted the Online Community ROI research study in May of 2007, as a function of the Online Community Research Network. The study explored how organizations determined ROI, what dimensions of value were being reported to management, and the attitudes in the organization around the concept of community value.

We had over 50 completed surveys, and participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, community platform providers and consultants. Most respondents were senior staff that managed most / all online community budgets for their organizations.

Organizational Attitudes Towards Online Community Investment

Overall, the survey results indicated a fairly high tolerance for investing in online community activities without clear “hard numbers” ROI. Other date in the survey results shows that dimensions of value other than fiduciary are being accepted as “return” on community investment and involvement. However, the majority of respondents did say they were expected to communicate clear return in the future. Creating a clear ROI model for most organizations is clearly a priority, even those not under immediate pressure to communicate value.



Attitude Towards Communication of Value
A small number of respondents reported that they had the ability to tie community initiatives back to their corporate goals, and to clearly communicate ROI. The majority of research participants felt their initiatives are adding value, but can’t provide a complete ROI model. A small percentage of respondents feel their initiatives are disconnected from corporate goals, and they currently don’t report on value. This speaks to the need for most organizations to create an ROI model, and one that includes more dimensions of value than direct financial value.



Online Community Budgets
One last data point from the survey. When we asked about online community budgets. 75% of those that answered indicated a spend of at least $50k, and there were a significant number of that indicated spends of over $100k and over $500k annually, not including headcount. Obviously one would need to understand an organization’s spend in other areas to determine the proportion of overall annual budget, but these budget numbers do indicate significant investment in community by the participating organizations.



Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/09/online-community-roi-reporting-on-dimensions-of-value/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/08/online-community-research-metrics-2007-report-posted/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/08/online-community-research-metrics-2007-report-posted/#comments Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:40:11 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=232 The Online Community Metrics 2007 research report has been posted on the Online Community Research Network. You can download the report from the OCRN home page.

Some of the most significant findings published in this study include:

• Metrics options: a wide-ranging list of new and different metrics which respondents found valuable apart from the norm of page visits and unique visitors.

• Desired metrics: a valuable wish list that has been complied by online community professionals for online community professionals.

• Tools for collecting metrics: a highlighted graph on data collected to see what the best services, tools and techniques are for collecting and analyzing online community data.

• Demonstrating ROI: Quantifying the value of community efforts for management.

• Advice: Top tips accumulated for community managers concerning best practice metrics.

Our research is predicated on the belief that the best source for information regarding online communities continues to be other online community professionals. A quote from the report:

“Numbers tell a story, but numbers only tell part of the story. Metrics are important – page views, new threads & posts, etc all tell you hard growth facts. But part of community is organic — how the culture is developing, how many people are forming deeper relationships with each other — these are important things for community growth that can’t be measured.”

Again, the full report can be downloaded from the Online Community Research Network home page: http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com

This research study is conducted as part of the recently launched Online Community Research Network (OCRN).

The OCRN is a collaborative research effort of online community professionals to better understand the challenges of building and managing online communities. You can find more information on the OCRN home page, if you are interested.

Enjoy the report!

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/08/online-community-research-metrics-2007-report-posted/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/07/metrics-page-views-out-time-on-site-in/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/07/metrics-page-views-out-time-on-site-in/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:45:05 +0000 Bill Johnston http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=222 Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping page views as a key site ranking metric, PaidContent.com and the AP report:

Now, news that Nielsen/NetRatings is planning a major shift in web metrics, moving, according to the AP, from page views as the key metric to time spent on a site.

This new approach will likely shake up current rankings, for instance:

…under the current system, AOL ranked sixth in total page views for May but first in total minutes: 25 billion. Using total time, Google drops to fifth from third in page views. (The reason given is Google’s mission to send people off quickly for answers; that’s probably true but ignores Google’s other mission now, which is to keep people engaged on its own sites.)

In our Online Community Metrics 2007 study (to be released in August), we found that page views were far and away the most collected and reported metric. If general confidence in this metric starts to erode, what will take its place? Is “Time spent on site” the most meaningful metrics for communities?

The other big issue is with online advertising. Most sites are using page views to correlate “impressions”, similar to traditional marketing campaigns. If page views become meaningless, who do marketers communicate value back to clients?

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/07/metrics-page-views-out-time-on-site-in/feed/ 1 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/01/community-metrics/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/01/community-metrics/#comments Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:12:00 +0000 Jim Cashel http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=127 How are you measuring the performance and health of your community?

This may seem like a strange or even whimsical question. Communities are organic and ever-evolving entities, right? Trying to benchmark and measure something as inherently chaotic and dynamic as online community performance, health, or the shiny new metric “engagement” can be challenging. But the reality is that this type of data is now expected from community managers by stakeholders and executives.

So where is one to start? I have outlined a few first steps below, based on my experience. You mileage, of course, may vary.

1. Review your “Basic” Web Metrics
Your “basic” web metrics, from sources like Hitbox or even your server logs will reveal quite a bit of data including # of page views, # of unique visitors, browser type, screen resolution, country, language and referring URLs. While this data in isolation won’t paint the “big picture” for you, it will give you some information to make decisions about design (target screen size), what browsers to design to, and potentially what languages to localize your community site in. This information also becomes more meaningful when you look at trends in the data over time.

2. Registrations and Attrition
These numbers are a bit more tricky to get, but you should definitely pay attention to registrations numbers. The ratio of registrations to casual visitors is also a great number to look at if one of your primary goals is conversion from visitor to member. Sign up form abandonment could indicate a usability issue with your signup flow, or could indicate that the value trade off of registering vs. the percieved benefit of the community isn’t clearly being communicated.

3. Look at Member Activity
Depending on how you collect metrics and what you used to instrument your site, data on visitor and member activity may be difficult to get as well. Being able to drill down on member participation in your community helps you understand if there is a good balance of the following functions in your community: contributors (those that produce content), connectors (those that form relationships) and consumers (those that consume content). Member activity data also gives you a good view (depending on the quality of the data) of how engaged (or not engaged) your members are in various content and features.

4. Watch Your Moderation / Maintenance Overhead
Are you constantly editing comments or discussion group posts? Banning members? Removing spam from your forums? Spending all you time approving comments or reviewing video clips before allowing them to be posted? Is hosting an online community inherently painful?

Well, in short, no.

Basically, any activity that detracts from the intended mission and purpose of the community should be tracked, and the root cause should be identified and addressed. This could be as simple as making your Discussion Group guidelines more clear and telling your moderators to lighten up (I had to do this). If you find yourself struggling against parts or all of your community rather than engaging in activity with them, something is wrong. Track the “overhead” for 2-3 months, and then take a time out with your team (and ideally members from your community) to discuss ways to optimize or solve the problem. You’ll be glad you did.

5. Ask Your Members
This should arguably be at the top of the list. The best source of data about how your community is doing? Your community. Creating an open dialog about community health and activity can be as simple as turning on blog comments or creating a new discussion forum for the sole purpose of discussing open issues and ways to improve the community.

I’ve also seen satisfaction surveys used in a very effective way to benchmark community health and satisfaction, as well as to gather feedback on usability issues, moderation activity, and feature enhancements. Several companies I know (SAP, Intiut) use the “Net Promoter” score to quantify the willingness of a member to recommend the community. You can find more information about the Net Promoter concept here:

The One Number You Need to Grow – Reichheld

Other Resources for You
Last March, Jim conducted a metrics survey and put together a white paper based on the results. You can check it out here:

Online Community Metrics Survey 2006

Forum One Web Fun fact: a lot of the snarky comments were mine, made before I knew I would eventually be working for Jim.

If you weren’t included in the 2006 survey, and would like to participate in the 2007 survey, please email me.
Survey invitations will be going out the first two weeks of February.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2007/01/community-metrics/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/11/community-performance-metrics-survey-results/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/11/community-performance-metrics-survey-results/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2006 07:22:00 +0000 Jim Cashel http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=124 In April we conducted a survey on online community performance metrics. We are now making the results public (they previously were shared just with participants).

The survey provides an excellent compilation of community metrics options; features and perks that can be offered to best users; management tactics; and general advice from experienced community managers.

The full 23 page report can be downloaded here.

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/11/community-performance-metrics-survey-results/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/04/performance-metrics-survey-thanks/ http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/04/performance-metrics-survey-thanks/#comments Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:09:00 +0000 Jim Cashel http://ocrdev.forumone.com/?p=5 Thanks to all of the participants of the recent online community performance metrics survey. We sent 100 surveys to senior online community professionals and received 60 completed replies. The results catalog most useful metrics and strategies for improving community performance. We will release the report to the public in September. Thanks again everyone!

Share/Bookmark

]]> http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/2006/04/performance-metrics-survey-thanks/feed/ 0