Making SharePoint analytics accessible to people who aren’t analysts

Since starting at SWOOP Analytics a few months ago, my primary focus has been to put the finishing touches on our newest product, SWOOP for SharePoint. The goal of SWOOP for SharePoint is to deliver a product that focuses on the analytics and insights Intranet and Communications teams would use on a daily basis to monitor and improve their intranet.  

For me personally, I’ve hit the ground running. SWOOP’s product ethos is to make analytics accessible to people who aren’t analysts, and this is something I’ve taken to heart as we’ve spoken to intranet managers, communications teams and content authors. People have a sense they should be measuring their intranet, but either have no real experience doing so, or have been battling with different analytics platforms trying to make sense of the information they’ve been presented.   

Website analytics are not designed for intranets 

Matt Dodd finalising details for SWOOP for SharePoint.

And here’s the first thing I’ve learned; analytics platforms built for consumer websites are not well suited for measuring intranets. They are highly sophisticated and require a lot of knowledge to understand what the different metrics are indicating. Lots of things can be, and are, measured but there is little to indicate which of these are more significant than others. There’s an abundance of data but without investing in experiments, it’s not clear what to change, and if that will have an impact of the measurements being monitored (or indeed if the right things are being measured). 

Bounce rate 

To compound things further, the use of consumer platforms has allowed certain measures to become rules of thumb that on further inspection don’t apply for intranets. For example, in our research interviews we often came across people wanting to measure and reduce the “bounce rate” on their pages. Bounce rate measures the percentage of visits to a page that visit only that page (so they don’t go on to view other pages). For an external site, bounce rate can be important as it shows whether advertising that gets people to click through is working well and people are going on to look at more of the site – something that’s important for people that might go on to purchase something. However, for intranets, a single page visit may be the best result as people go to a page, find what they need and then get on with work. This would show up as a high bounce rate. 

Page views 

Page views is another measure that gets used as a proxy for how popular a page is. But if this is not linked to a person who is viewing, it can lead to a false impression of what is popular. A few people looking at a page many times gives a similar number of page views as lots of people looking at a page a few times.  

Signals of success 

In short, we must challenge these rules of thumb and really focus on what are the better “signals of success” for an intranet. For SWOOP for SharePoint this means we are looking to report on actual visitors and the visits they make. We are also creating specific ways to measure whether people engage with content by reading it all, skimming it for key information, or scanning it for links or keywords. This allows content creators to understand if people have seen their content AND if they’ve actually engaged with it. 

Reviewing analytics is not done continuously 

The difficulty intranet teams have in getting analytics from their platforms means that in many cases they look at the measures infrequently. This might be as part of a monthly or quarterly reporting or only as part of developing a strategy (or business case) for making significant changes to the intranet. This produces an ongoing cycle of reviewing the intranet (where stats are gathered), followed by making improvements, and then implementing them for a while before the cycle starts again.   

For SWOOP for SharePoint we wanted to focus on the insights intranet and comms teams would access daily, if they were easier to access. This breaks the long review, improve, implement cycle by allowing them to happen continuously in parallel. We want to make sure we provide those essential and meaningful insights that make it simple for people to focus on things that drive action. For example, we provide a health score for each page, site and intranet as a whole, and surface pages that would benefit from some improvement, whether that be correcting spelling errors or re-writing into more accessible language.   

We have developed a set of essential reports to provide an easy-to-use view of the analytics which adds the most value to a daily routine of improvements and gives a snapshot of things to delve into further. These are supported by additional dashboards and categories with more in-depth reports to address important, but less frequent, insights. As we develop new measures and reports, these will flow into the relevant dashboards. 

Understanding customer problems is better than customer requirements 

During the research we found people either had existing - but difficult - analytics, or had none. To ensure we focused on the right things to develop, we moved beyond asking for requirements to asking about what the problems and issues they faced when managing their intranets. Requirements tended to focus on providing existing features that didn’t necessarily help intranet and comms teams address the root cause of issues.  

A screenshot of SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint.

We didn’t completely ignore these requirements, as we know people need to have confidence in all the analytics we provide. But by understanding the key issues intranets face – devolved publishing and governance, limited time to work on improvements, employee experience and engagement issues and so on – we prototyped what reports might be needed and how they would look.  

A screenshot of SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint.

The prototyping allowed us to get a set of reports that will aid organisations to really deliver on the basics of intranet management. We have identified and are working on further reports that will extend into more rich and deep insights, such as visitor journey network maps that elevate understanding about the employee digital experience. Ultimately, we want to help organisations to make sure their intranets are useful and usable, as well as used. 

We’re excited to be close to releasing our initial SWOOP for SharePoint product. If you would like a walk-through of the prototypes, or you’re interested in trialling SWOOP for SharePoint please contact us today.