Key Metrics for Monitoring the Success of Your Community

There are hundreds of different user and community metrics you could monitor, and many different ways to do it. For this post, we’re going to look at some specific metrics which can help you understand your community at different stages of its life, and also your members on their journey from ‘newly registered’ to community advocate. 

What you measure and what you do with the data depends on your unique situation, but hopefully the following post gives you some useful insight and direction.

Community engagement metrics

The context of your community’s maturity is critical for finding the optimum metrics to monitor. Most communities can fit into one of three stages: 

• Launch
• Growth
• Maturity

Launch

The most common play for launching new communities is getting as many new members and producing as much new content as possible. More is better! Metrics would include things like number of new registrations, number of posts, number of engagements etc. 

Growth

It is normal for things to slow down as the community grows in size. Your community manager will need to put in a lot of hours stimulating discussions and encouraging participation. The key here is encouraging members to start introducing their own discussions or organizing conferences and competitions. Once your community is at a good size, it can start working towards a degree of self-sufficiency. 

Key metrics might transition to: 

• Number of active and contributing members
• Number of novel discussions started
• Average time to resolve problems
• Ratio of churn to new member registration

Maturity

Once your community reaches a large, stable size with predictable engagement and retention, the focus shifts towards establishing tangible ROI – return of investment – and value to the business or organization. We’re looking for evidence that members are becoming true brand advocates and that the community is firmly self-sustaining. Metrics might include: 

• Number of new product ideas or solutions
• Number of product referrals or revenue from community

These are much harder to track, but most communities this size will need some way of demonstrating its business value, because they are not free to run! 

Member journey metrics

The initial goal of any community is to attract new members with awesome content and stimulating discussion. Then we want to retain them long-term, and gradually have them share their expertise and contribute to discussions, even posting their own. Over time, the most valuable members will graduate from valuable support roles to full-on brand advocates who champion your culture and go out of their way to demonstrate your community’s value to others. 

You can track this user journey by analyzing metrics at four core stages: 

1. Discovery
2. Onboarding
3. Support
4. Advocacy

Discovery

New members are looking for high-value, engaging information and answers to specific questions. They probably have no aspirations for advocacy; your job is to make the community feel so valuable and fun that they keep coming back for more. 

Potential metrics: 

• Number of page views
• Unique forums visited
• Number of total sessions

Onboarding

Once a member is consistently turning up and passively participating (either by downloading resources, giving likes/upvotes, reading lots of discussions) you can consider them in the ‘onboarding’ stage. You can identify users in this stage by metrics like: 

• Average time per session
• Total time on site
• Number of engagements
• Number of resources downloaded

Support

This is where you want most of your members to end up. Not just reading and absorbing information, but divulging it. Track how well members are helping to resolve problems. If ‘ticket deflection’ is up (i.e. customers are self-serving themselves with answers… thanks to your community!) this is an excellent tie to ROI for the business. 

See how supportive your members are with metrics like: 

• Number of case deflections
• Average case resolution time
• First response time
• Percentage of problems solved

Advocacy

Advocates are invaluable and, thankfully, fairly easy to spot. Look at things like the number of referrals from specific members (e.g. using unique referral codes), leads from social shares, and members who resolve a disproportionately high number of tickets. 

Of course these are only indications of what you can track and analyze—there are hundreds of other metrics and dozens of alternative ways to view your community and users. As a rule of thumb however, the better you understand your members and where they are (through these metrics), the better you can guide the whole community in the right direction. 

Brought to you by Eric Tracz

I’m a Digital Nomad currently living in Manila, The Philippines. Co-Founder and CEO of PeepSo.com. First time WordCamp Speaker at WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017, WordCamp Singapore 2019 and hoping to speak more soon. I started my journey with open source nearly a decade ago as a simple support guy. Joomla! was my first encounter with the world of Open Source. After that period of my life got phased out I fell in love with WordPress and never left. I have been both lucky and at the same time I worked my ass off to get to where I am right now. Free time, if I have any, is usually spent with my wife and / or travel around South-East Asia. Even when I’m supposed to be on a little vacation, not a day goes by when I don’t check up on PeepSo. So far visited or lived in: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China, Japan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Norway, Germany, Scotland, England and more… Whenever possible, I jump on my Ducati Monster and just ride.