In today’s world, many companies use Microsoft SharePoint® to fulfill two important goals: (1) to have a content management and storage system and (2) to host the intranet of the company.

It’s the second goal that interests us the most in this article: SharePoint® based intranets. An intranet centralizes access to enterprise information and applications. It helps an organization manage its internal communications, applications and information in a very easy way.

But, how do we know if our intranet is being successful? Here are our Top 7 KPIs that will help determine the success of your intranet and provide ROI insights.

1. Engagement & adoption

To prove that your intranet is successful, you need to make sure that employees are using it and how often they do. By tracking the percentage of active users and their level of contributions, you will have an accurate picture of the engagement and intranet adoption rate of employees. Besides tracking active users, you’d want to know how often they come by – is it every day, every month?

Why is this important? Because it gives you the percentage of employees that are really interacting with your intranet and provides a great baseline to measure improvements, especially when you first launch the intranet.

How to measure? Identify the percentage of Active vs Inactive members in the intranet. How many unique monthly or even daily active users do you have? Also, look into the volume of contributions the active members make – are they more into commenting and giving feedback or just reading content?

2. Audience Reach

Once you have identified your engaged users in the intranet, it is important to know where they come from in your organization and if they are indeed the audience you are initially trying to reach. Analyzing the business cases of these top users is key, as you can try to replicate their success across other populations to grow the engagement.
As for the inactive members, it is also key to know who they are and have an action plan ready. These action plans may include targeted communications to encourage activity, boost adoption, seek for training, and more.

Why is it important? Because there might be users that need more training or guidance than others when it comes to using the intranet – they might be missing out on features and content that are key for their job! Some employees might have adopted the intranet faster than others, and they can easily become your internal advocates and help you boost engagement among their peers.

How to measure? Based on your organization’s Active Directory, you should be able to identify the different populations (departments, business units, countries, office locations…) that have the most visits in the intranet as well as the ones that are not connecting at all.

3. Time spent & access

Most intranets’ home pages are pushed on the employees when they open a new page in their browser, which can generate some misleading stats – after all, all employees would happen to be “active” on the intranet even if they just opened the browser to go on another website. This is why measuring the time users spend in the intranet is key.

Why is it important? Understanding how much time users spend in your intranet is very important as it will give you a solid indication on how engaged your employees are. This can also be a good indicator to know where and how users are accessing the intranet and where they prefer to work and look for useful information.

How to measure? With Tryane Analytics you can easily track the volume of sessions made as well as the duration of these sessions within a specific site or even for the whole platform. This will show how engaged your users are with the content you’re publishing.

You can also identify the different sites and pages bringing people over, otherwise called the user path. These sources will help you understand if your newsletters are working better than the webparts in the home page, or vice versa.

4. Top users

It is up to you to define what a top user would be in your context. Maybe it’s someone accessing the intranet every day to read the most recent news, the one making the most contributions or even the one having fully completed their user profiles or subscribing to the most sites.

Why is it important? Drawing a portrait of what the ideal employee/intranet user would be can help define some goals for improvement. As we mentioned earlier, there are always employees using the intranet more than others, so understanding how they do it can help us replicate their success elsewhere.

5. Most viewed items

Every communications manager needs to know if their news are being read and by whom. Identifying the most viewed items is key when defining a communication strategy.

Why is it important? The success of an intranet relies on the quality of the content users can find there. Your most viewed items are without a doubt those your users are most interested in reading – be it because content is interesting or because it helps them on their everyday life at work.

How to measure? On any given site or library, identify the items that have gathered the most views in a period (7 days, 30 days). It’s an interesting analysis to make if most of the top ones talk about the same topic or are following the same format (PDFs, Power Points presentations…) and voice (informal or formal).

6. Least viewed items

Knowing what your least viewed items are is as important as knowing the most viewed ones. They can either be items that are no longer relevant or in phase with the current communications strategy or the ones that users don’t find useful.

Why is it important? These items are not relevant for your organization anymore and haven’t been for a while. Identifying what those items are and understanding why they failed is key to improve a communications strategy. Besides, inactive items take up space in the platform, so chances are you’ll need to delete or archive them anyway.

How to measure? Just as with active items, identify the inactive items in a site or library on a given time span (3 months, 6 months).

7. Search

Employees use the SharePoint search to easily find the content they really need.

Why is it important? Because knowing what users are looking for is key to know which content needs to be created. Besides, queries can tell a lot about the main interests of the users and the possible improvements that can be made on the interface for it to be a user-friendly space. Keeping a close eye on it can be very beneficial in the long-term.

How to measure? Identify what the most queried terms are in the search center as well as the success rate of these queries in the end – are they successful or abandoned queries? Did users find the information they needed?

Conclusion

To properly assess the success (or failure) of an intranet, it is imperative to first define what success would look like to you. This starts by establishing your goals and knowing what resources you can deploy in order to attain them.

Once these two aspects are defined, it is then important to measure the progress you have made. You can do that with the help of an analytics solution such as Tryane Analytics for SharePoint®.

By now, you must know that having a successful intranet and ensuring its continuous improvement is an ongoing commitment and demands for constant monitoring of your KPIs.

Tryane Analytics for SharePoint® is the tool that will help you closely follow these indicators and grow the ROI of your digital transformation.