Using Analytics to Improve Your Intranet

Organizations can use analytics to improve their intranets continuously. With a solid plan, a dedicated team, and strong reporting capabilities, your intranet can achieve lasting success and significantly benefit your organization.

Implementing a successful intranet requires more than just designing a great solution. What happens after launch is crucial, and ongoing improvements based on data-driven decisions will be key to long-term success. The cycle of driving adoption, measuring results, improving the solution, and then starting over ensures that the intranet evolves to meet users' needs effectively.

The Importance of Measurement

The impact of an intranet can be measured or estimated in several ways: surveys, polls, interviews, and analyzing intranet metrics. Organizations should set intranet targets aligned with overall business goals and establish reporting capabilities for effective evaluation. Targets, measures, and reports will vary between organizations, but common metrics include usage, reach, interactions, activity, and more.

The saying “what gets measured gets managed” applies perfectly to intranets. Using analytics to monitor impact, solution health, and content status is essential for intranet success.

Here is how you can implement intranet analytics step by step to improve the solution and its impact over time.

Steps for Implementing Intranet Analytics

First, define goals for your intranet. Set clear objectives that outline what you want to achieve, such as improving internal communications, boosting employee engagement, or driving productivity. Ensure these objectives support the broader goals of the organization to prioritize efforts and justify resources allocated to intranet improvements.

Next, identify key metrics and KPIs relevant to your goals. Track usage metrics like the number of active users, session duration, and page views to understand how employees use the intranet. Measure engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares to gauge content engagement, and assess performance by tracking views, reads, and the freshness of updates.

To add more value to reports, segment your user base based on department, role, location, or similar criteria. This helps you understand how different parts of your organization use the intranet.

Once metrics and segments are in place, start collecting data on user interactions, activity, content performance, and other relevant areas. Configure reports to fit your requirements, customizing them to highlight the metrics that matter most to your organization’s goals. Use analytics tools to automate report generation and flag actions needed to ensure timely insights and actions.

In a modern intranet, you can set up customized and targeted report centers. Each dashboard should present relevant metrics tailored to the specific needs of stakeholders like solution owners, content managers, IT administrators, and leadership teams. If possible, ensure these dashboards provide real-time data access for timely decision-making.

Make evaluation a recurring part of your intranet initiative by scheduling regular reviews of key indicators. These reviews could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the organization’s needs. Focus on actionable insights and identify improvements such as updating content, adjusting navigation structures, or enhancing the user experience.

Finally, maintain a structured approach to evaluation and continuous improvement. Regularly adjust methods and refine reports to enhance your ability to evaluate how the intranet is helping the organization perform.

Take data-driven decisions with Omnia

Omnia offers powerful capabilities for measuring intranet impact through built-in metrics and reports, supported by the flexibility of the open-source product Matomo Core. Our intranet-as-a-service offering includes an analytics concept and setup, providing each customer with full ownership and control of their data.

Omnia analytics includes a variety of widgets and reports on metrics like usage, user behavior, heatmaps, real-time activity, and solution status. All reports can be customized, and tailored dashboards can be set up for different target groups. With Omnia, you will have the power to make data-driven decisions to improve your intranet.

If you want to learn more about how to enhance your intranet and its impact, and how Omnia can support you, please reach out to one of our Omnia Coaches. Talking to an experienced expert will be a great first step toward structured evaluation.

Conclusion

By following the steps above and using Omnia’s powerful capabilities, organizations can leverage analytics to improve their intranets continuously. Setting clear goals, tracking key metrics, segmenting users, and regularly reviewing insights will ensure the intranet remains a valuable tool for employees.

And remember, “what gets measured gets managed” — and that applies to intranets as well. Evaluating performance will likely lead to increased value and effectiveness of your intranet.