Metrics for the Community Engagement Pyramid

Assuming you are using some version of an Engagement Pyramid for your community, you will quickly be asking yourself “Just how many people have we converted to each level in my community?” To help answer that we’ve put together a list of easy to use metrics and related tools.

The Metrics

At each stage along the Engagement Pyramid, community members are engaged in different activity and that behavior signature can be turned into a metric and monitored. Generally speaking people higher up the pyramid are engaged in the activities lower down as well: for example a community Evangelist is almost always a Contributor as well. We recommend you consider tracking what you can of the metrics below but customize them to match your specific community goals. For example, if you are all about videos testimonials you would want to know about how many videos were uploaded, viewed, and shared.

  • 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

The Tools

Google Analytics: By far the most powerful and yet relatively simple approach to gathering data about visitation is by using Google Analytics. You will need to have admin access to your online community in order to add a small snippet of HTML code to each page. Quite a few community platforms allow you to do this including Ning, Drupal, Joomla, and shortly WiserEarth. You can capture Pages per Visit, Pageviews, Time on Site, Unique Visitors, and Bounce Rate that way. What you might want to try and distinguish between are Visitors and Members. Some platform plug-in modules will let you set-up Google Analytics to distinguish between logged-in Members and all other Visitors. Otherwise you can ask a developer to help you do this.

Internal Analytics: Many community platforms provide their own analytics. These are particularly useful for understanding Member activity. You can usually find data on # of External Invitations, New Registrations, Member Visits, # of Edits, # of Comments, # of New User Generated Content this way.

External Sharing: If you are hosting your own platform consider using a utility like ShareThis to encourage sharing of content with other services like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, and Delicious. ShareThis has its own Reporting Dashboard where you can see what was shared and where. If you don’t have that option look at mentions of your community in key outreach sites for your community. A simple utility is SiteVolume which will show your keyword mentions on Digg. MySpace. YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Also you can measure how many link backs you have to your community using Google – just put ‘link:’ in front of your site address and it will give you a number on the right hand side.

Member Surveys: Good old fashioned customer surveys using services like SurveyMonkey, are a great way to get at more intangible information. This data is ’self-reported’ and therefore less reliable than other methods, but you do get the chance to also ask open ended questions. This is a great way to get at satisfaction levels, visitation frequency, use of specific functionality, and the quality of your community leadership.

Performance Monitoring: How much your site is used depends in large part on how fast it is and the site’s uptime. Compare your site’s performance against your competitors using a free service like Mon.itor.US. If you spot downtime not related to server maintenance you might want to consider moving your hosted service somewhere else.

The Review Process

We recommend reviewing your performance at least every month, and compare month-over-month (MoM%) and year-over-Year (YoY%) growth rates in a spreadsheet. Set some easy to achieve goals at the start – and share your success back with the community. If a metric doesn’t work for you – because it’s to hard to collect the data, or is too hard to interpret the results – just change it.

Finally, if you want to get more sophisticated, I would highly recommend the soon to be released book ‘Complete Web Monitoring’ by Alistair Croll and Sean Power. Also, if you are managing a blog community you might want to check out Beth Kanter’s slideshare from E-metrics last year.

This post is part of a series including The Community Engagement Pyramid and Light your Community Path.

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Sources: Alistair Croll, Complete Web Monitoring – Tools for “Big Picture” Understanding, Forum One Networks, Online Community ROI Models and Reports

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