Using Google Analytics to improve intranet usage

This article is for Google Analytics beginners and aims to go through some of the most helpful reports to gain valuable insights into the behavior of intranet users in your Happeo digital workplace.

(Note: Here you can find instructions on how to connect your Happeo account with Google Analytics.)

The aim of this blog post is to outline some handy reports that can help you evaluate your intranet performance. For a complete introduction to Google Analytics, please use Google’s free training center.

This post will address two main areas of the default Google report i.e.

• The Path that needs to be traversed inside the Google Analytics tool to access the report
  
  
• The insights or inference that can be drawn from the existing reports by any user of the Google Analytics tool

Always select the date range you’d like to look at first. You can do so in the top right corner. If you want, you can also compare to different date ranges to each other.

Get an overview of the audience using your Digital Workplace

Path: Reports -> Audience - Overview

Purpose of this Report: This report provides information about the users who visit any page in Happeo. The Overview page provides you with a clear dashboard of the most important data and graphs to look at. If you'd like to go more into detail, just click on the link below the graphs.

Key measures tracked

• Users: This field tracks the total amount of logins, both existing and new users
  
  
• Sessions: This is an interaction that happens on the website by the users. Sessions change if the user is inactive for 30 minutes or they get reset after the new day starts on the clock
  
  
• Bounce Rate: A useful metric to check how many visitors (out of the total visitors) left without seeing any other page or who leave after visiting only one page
  
  
• Average Session Duration: This metric indicates how long a user on average spends on Happeo

Questions that can be answered

• Are the users engaged when they visit Happeo?
  
  
• What time of the day does the portal get maximum traffic?
  
  
• Are the users spending enough time in the application?
  
  
• What demographic or system do your users use?
  
  
• What is the browser language of the users?
  
  
• Are more employees using the intranet each month?
  
  
• Are they visiting more pages each visit or less?
  
  
• Do they spend more or less time in your Happeo portal?

Get an overview of the Pages content is being visited

Path: Reports -> Behaviour -> Overview

Purpose of the Report: The reports give a quick view of which Pages are popular amongst your users

Key measures tracked

Unique Page Views: This metric counts the unique combination of each page and page title combination. If a user visits a same page multiple times, then only singe visit is counted in this metric.

Average Time on Page: Average amount of time spent by a user on a page

% Exit: This metric talks about the how many users out of total users exit from a page

In addition to the above metric, another interesting report is the ‘Behavior Flow report’ (Reports -> Behavior -> Behavior Flow). This report helps in tracking the path the users take in Happeo from the first page they visit to the last page visited before exiting. The behaviour flow shows how your users navigate through Happeo.

Questions that can be answered

• Which Pages receive the most traffic and the least traffic?
  
  
• What is the total page traffic on the given date range?

These are just some basic reports of the endless number of different reports you can create. To learn more about custom reports you can do a free Google Analytics online course in the Google Analytics Academy.

Happeo's Advanced Analytics

Here's the real game changer: Happeo's Advanced Analytics. The Analytics add-on is here to give you access to the Internal Communication metircs that make it easy to understand what matters to your people. A dashboard full of graphs will provide you with an overview of:

• The most searched keywords
  
  
• Total searches
  
  
• Unique search users
  
  
• Success and failure percentages
  
  
• The most viewed Channels or Pages
  
  
• The most engaging posts 
  
  
• The MVP of content contributors

You want to review the report at your next board meeting? Download it as a .csv file or import your data from into another system – the sky's the limit.