Your intranet can be a powerful tool to reach your employees – especially if you’ve gotten back to the basics. But your intranet can be so much more than it currently is for you. Just like any other HR-related program, your HR metrics should be used to drive deeper engagement and a better employee experience.
What the Goal?
Hopefully you’ve answered the three most important questions about your intranet leading to: knowing exactly what the goal of your intranet is (and should be). With a concrete goal, you will then be able to build the correct HR metrics around your goal to drive change and behaviors.
For intranets, it doesn’t work the other way around – you must come up with your desired outcomes first, then start tracking to ensure you’re meeting them.
Metric 1: Who and How Long
Intranet metrics are going to look and feel a bit different than the HR metrics you’re used to tracking. But sometimes, that makes them even easier to evaluate.
The first metric you want to track is who is actually coming to your intranet and how long they’re staying – and how it matches your desired population and activities.
I know this sounds like two metrics, and it is – but when you evaluate them together, you get a better sense of who you’re serving and how well you’re doing it. You want the right people coming to your site and then taking the desired actions you want them to take – by looking at who’s coming and how long they’re staying, you will be able to make objective decisions as to what needs to be changed or remain the same to drive behaviors.
Metric 2: Where’s the Heat?
Heat mapping is a real thing – and a metric you should install on your intranet immediately if available. Note: this is widely available for sites created on many platforms except… SharePoint. If you’re on SharePoint – don’t fret. This is a great metric to have, but you can use document statistics and site statistics to create your own “heat.”
Heat mapping metrics shows where people actually touch/click on your site – and shows you in varying colors, where the hottest parts of your site are, and where the no-touch-zones are. And trust me – it’s never aligned with what you “think” it should be.
Heat maps are critical to help you understand the user experience – where they’re most frequently going, what is being ignored (and if it ignored, can it be removed?), and which parts of your website need a redesign.
Metric 3: Conversion Rates
Wait, what? Conversion rates… I just went fully into online marketing speak. Conversion rates mean how many people take the desired action you want them to take on your site. This can be a sign-up to your newsletter, clicking on a specific button or page, opening up a specific link, “finding” a special page, and so on.
You want to track how many people visit compared to how many people do what you want them to. This will help you evaluate if your call to action (CTA) is in the appropriate spot, have the right language, is within the user’s line of sight, and how compelling your CTA is.
Conversion rates will be different for each CTA you create – the higher the rate, the better job you and your intranet is doing to create the right conversations.
