4 simple tips to measure correctly on the intranet

An intranet should have a goal and a purpose, and to follow up on them you need to measure and analyse how it works in practice. But measure in the right way! Only then can you improve the tool in the places that really need it.

1. Measure only what you can change

It's easy to want to find out everything possible, but if you can't do anything about a particular outcome, it's unnecessary to even produce those statistics. Sometimes, someone might order an analysis to play with numbers, but they are not interested in improving the tool. Instead, spend your precious time looking at what would really make the intranet better.

2. Look at what participation looks like

Collect data on how many people have created and edited pages, commented and engaged on the intranet in a given period. This will show you how much participation the tool has and whether it is fulfilling its interactive function. If the numbers are low, you can investigate why; perhaps you need to create better content or spend time on training. You can also look at which employees are most active, so they can help lead any change. Typically, 80% of content is created by 20% of employees or less, so if you can change the behavior of these people, the intranet will change too.

3. Find out what engages employees

You don't just need to know what percentage of the intranet is engaging – to have happy users, you need to know what kind of content and structure is resonating. Look at the top 10 most viewed and commented news stories from a given period. Examine what they have in common to see what drives the most traffic. Feedback to the employees and departments that produce a lot of content, so they can further adapt the content on the intranet.

4. Do a search analysis

Looking at the words that are typed into the search bar the most times will give you a good insight into what users expect from the intranet and what is asked of you. It also tells you how they are searching for the information, which can help you fine-tune the search results to be as accurate as possible.

If the most common keywords are all about the same thing, you may need to revise your structure to make it easier to find the information. If, on the other hand, the results are null, meaning there is no content at all, you have a few options. You can create an error page that nicely explains that there is no information, or you can ask relevant staff to create content around what users were looking for. If the zero result is due to a misspelling, you can add a misspelling feature like Google's "Did you mean...?". Similarly, you can do the same with synonyms so that users don't miss content just because they use a different word than the editor intended. Being constantly met with zero results does not make employees very keen to use the intranet, so try to have content that corresponds to users' searches as much as possible.