Intranets – The Other Website
While most of you reading my posts are focused on your public website, in this post I am going to share how you can leverage your web analytics skills internally at your organization. Company Intranets are often times larger than the public website and using the tips I will share here, you can get some big visibility internally and become the hero of your HR team!
Why You Should Care About Your Intranet
Companies often spend a LOT of $$$ on building Intranets. Unfortunately, not everyone at the company uses the Intranet. If you can help your internal team show what is working and what is not working on the Intranet, you can help them to save a lot of money. In addition to the altruistic reasons to track what happens on the Intranet, there are the following selfish reasons:
- Tagging Intranets is a great way to try new things and get better at web analysis in a safe environment
- Intranets often have low traffic volume so it is a great way to help cost-justify increased budgets for web analytics (“Mr. CEO, not only does this money go towards tracking the website, it also allows us to track our entire Intranet!” – Just don’t tell them that tracking the Intranet costs all of $1,000 in server calls!)
- Showing people what is happening on the Intranet does wonders for people inside your organization understanding what the heck you do for the public website!
I have seen situations where a web analytics team has killed themselves trying to get senior executives to see what is taking place on the website and what improvements could be made based upon solid web analysis, only to see the same team get promoted or more budget after spending 2-3 weeks showing what takes place on the Intranet (something that they actually use)! It sounds completely illogical, but I guess if you can’t beat them, join them!
Tracking Intranets
So what should you track on Intranets? The following are my best practices learned working with a few large clients. The one caveat to everything below is that you have to be sure to track all of this data in a different report suite than all of your other website data!
Employee ID
Depending upon the security policy of your company, ask if you are able to track down the the Employee ID level. I tend to not do this since it can be a bit creepy, but it is technically possible and you can replace the Omniture Visitor ID with your own unique employee identifier.
Non-Personally Identifiable Employee Info
On each Intranet page, I recommend that you pass Department, Region, Business Unit, Office Location, Employee Band Level (i.e. VP, Manager), etc… to variables. This will allow you to break down all Pages by these data points. I generally pass these to an sProp and an eVar (save some time setting both through this post) and also recommend you put your top five of these into a 5-item Traffic Data Correlation.
Pages & Sections
Obviously, you want to pass in a unique page name for every Intranet page like you would any other website. In addition, you should pass the Intranet section to the Site Sections (Channel) variable. As always, I recommend that you enable Pathing on the Channel sProp so you can see how employees are navigating between Intranet sections.
Internal Search
Just like a public website, Internal Search is usually important on Intranets. You should track Internal Search on the Intranet just as you would on a public website. You can apply the same principles I mentioned in this Internal Search post. This includes tracking what search terms people are looking for, but the beauty here is that you can see these by Department, Region, etc…
Timeparting
Many of my Intranet clients were keen to see when employees were accessing the Intranet, so I recommend you implement the Timeparting Plug-in. This allows you to see what day of the week and time of the day employees access the Intranet. Don’t forget to create a correlation between these sProps and your other ones so you can see when each page/section is accessed most often.
Internal Promotions
Much in the same way that I described Internal Campaigns in the past, Intranets may have promotional areas that try and entice employees to click. You can track these the same way you would a public website.
Intranet KPI’s
The following are the types of KPI’s I have seen used for Intranets:
Page Views/Visit & Average Time Spent/Visit
Depending upon whether your goal is to get employees in and out or get them to spend more time reading Intranet content, you can use this calculated metric to see how you are doing.
Page Views (Event)
As I described in this post, I would recommend that you set a Success Event on each page. Why? Well let’s say you want to see how many pages on the Intranet a specific internal e-mail led to. You can open the Campaigns report, find the e-mail and then see how many pages were viewed. You can then use an eVar Subrelation to break this down by page name (as long as you pass Pagename to an eVar) to see the exact pages viewed.
Internal Searches
As you would on a website, you should track and trend the # of Internal Searches taking place on the Intranet.
Logins
If employees have to log into your Intranet, you can capture that as a KPI to see how you are doing at getting them to access the Intranet. This can also be used for segmentation (i.e. show me all users who have not logged into the Intranet in the past 30 days…)
Custom KPI’s
Many times, Intranets are used to get employees to fill out forms, surveys, etc… Each of these key actions should be captured with a Success Event and in the case of Forms, you should capture the Form Name in an eVar so you can break it down appropriately.
Employee Profile Views
As we march down the road of internal social media, it is fun to track how often each employee’s Intranet Profile is viewed. Using new tools like Salesforce.com Chatter, we may be moving to a world where employees get “followers” so you can track how often people are looking at or following other employees. This allows you to see who your employees think are important (which may not always align to the org chart!).
Final Thoughts
As you can see, if you know what you are doing for tracking a public website, tracking an Intranet uses many of the same principles. If you are just getting started in web analytics, feel free to apply the above items on your Intranet as a testing ground before you tackle the public website. If you have some other cool things you have done to track your Intranet, please feel free to leave a comment here…
