Insights is the built-in statistical tool for Intranet Connections software, providing admins with tools to better understand intranet usage. Learn more in the Stats Overview article.
The Main Dashboard lets you measure overall intranet adoption and engagement. It contains three sections, viewable as you scroll down the page:
- People - Displays overall intranet adoption as a percentage of total staff who have used the intranet in the given time frame
- Engagement - Per user, average number of visits and time spent per visit
- Content - Summary of items added, viewed, and deleted, as well as top contributors
Filters
Statistics displayed in the Main Dashboard can be filtered down by a specific time frame, site, or by people in a specific department or location. Filtering is done using both the primary filter and secondary filter. These filters are applied to all metrics in the Main Dashboard (People, Engagement, Content).
Use the primary filter in the top right to view statistics for a given time frame, or to choose to view the metrics for all sites or a specific site.
Use the secondary filter to choose different account types, and to filter by a specific department or location.
Secondary Filter Account Types
- Everyone - Displays statistics for both Employees and Logins
- Employees - Show only statistics for staff who have a full employee profile
- Logins - Show only statistics for logins that don’t have a full employee profile
In the intranet, you can have two different account types: Employees and Logins.
- Employees are accounts usually associated with full-time staff. A user with an Employee account appears within the Employee Directory application.
- Login accounts are accounts created to provide access to the intranet, usually for part-time or casual staff. Users with login accounts do not show up in the Employee Directory.
People Metric
The people metric displays as a percentage, the total number of users who have accessed the intranet divided by the total number of users who have intranet accounts.
In the above example, the primary filter time frame is set to Apr 16, 2022 to May 16, 2022. In that time frame, 22 of a possible 27 users used the intranet, for an overall adoption rate of 81.5%. The people metric also displays the same metric (87.5%) for the immediately previous time frame, which in the example is Mar16, 2022 to Apr 15, 2022. Comparing these two periods, there was an overall relative decrease of 6.9%.
Issue: My People Percentage Looks Too Low
If this percentage is lower than you’d expect, the first thing to do is to check if there were logins created to the intranet that are no longer in use.
- A login is access to the intranet without a related Employee record in Employee Directory
- Logins are often created for temporary access, and should be deleted when no longer needed
To filter out these logins, change secondary filter from Everyone to Employees, and click Apply.
Tip: Use People Export to Find Inactive Accounts
While the People metric is designed to give you an at-a-glance view of overall intranet adoption, you can use the Export link to view the individual accounts. Clicking the Export link in the People section will provide you a list of users. This generates a .csv file you can open in Excel.
Active = 0 indicates they didn't access the intranet. In the above example, you can see that there are 2 login accounts who are not active, and 1 employee account not active.
If you can verify that these accounts or logins are no longer valid, they should be disabled in the intranet. Note that in terms of the People metric, it calculates its percentage based on the accounts that were active in the given time frame. For example, if an account is disabled on Jan 15, 2017, the account will still count towards the percentage total for any time frame before or including Jan 15. In Insights, disabling unused accounts will result in an increase in the people metric only for time frames after the disabled date.
Engagement Metric
While the People metric allows you to measure the overall intranet penetration rate, the Engagement metric lets you measure the level of engagement for users who are using the intranet.
Engagement is measured in sessions and minutes, as follows:
- Sessions - Per person, how often they visit the intranet each day; a session is defined as a period of activity with no more than 30 minutes of inactivity
- Time - Per person, how many minutes they spend on the intranet per day
The engagement metrics given an overall profile for how engaged your users are in the intranet. In the example above, an “average user” goes to the intranet twice a day, and over those two sessions, spends a total of 27 minutes. Note however, this profile is based on averages across all employees, and it could be that you have users with very high usage, and very low usage which contribute to this average.
You can use the secondary filters on the top of the Main Dashboard to view the Engagement metrics by a specific department or location to see how much your engagement metrics are different between different subsets of employees. Alternatively, you could use the Export link, which will give you the daily breakdown by users of their number of sessions and time spent.
Note that having the intranet set as the default home page for staff browsers does not affect the engagements statistics. The system still counts the view of the home page, but in terms of engagement metrics, we don’t include sessions with 0 minutes.
Example: Finding Low Adoption Per Department / Location
Whether you are rolling out an intranet for the first time, or re-launching the intranet, the first question to answer is who is, and isn’t using the intranet. We will want to:
- Establish a baseline of intranet activity
- Compare specific departments or locations to the baseline
- Check for specific people not using the intranet
1. Establish a Baseline of Intranet Activity
To establish as baseline, you can measure:
- If users are logging in
- How often, and for how long staff are spending on the intranet
The primary filter options are located on the top right of the page. You can look at statistics for all sites, or a specific site, and choose the date range you want to examine. It defaults to the last 30 days. To view Q1 for 2022, change the start date to Jan 1, and the last date to March 31.
By selecting the first three months of 2022, you’ll automatically get the comparison to the same period immediately prior, which is Q4 2021. This helps establish the baseline. In the above example:
- 86.2% of all people (25 of 29) accessed the intranet at least once between Jan 1, 2022 and Mar 31, 2022
- This is an overall relative increase of 0.6%
However, the 86.2% is calculated over all accounts with access to the intranet. Let’s change the secondary filter from Everyone to Employees to exclude logins created for temporary or casual staff.
With the logins removed, 88.2% of full-time employees have accessed the intranet. Ideally this would be 100%, but let’s treat 88.2% as the overall baseline. For the people who are accessing the intranet, the Engagement metric shows an overview of their activity.
With this data you now have a baseline for the organization overall:
- 88% of staff access the intranet
- The average user visits the intranet once a day
- The average user spends 18 minutes a day on the intranet
2. Compare Specific Departments or Locations to the Baseline
It’s not uncommon that one department or location has not adopted the intranet as strongly as the rest of the organization. We can use a comparison to our baseline to quantify how big the problem actually is. Let’s first check the Executive team, by changing the secondary filter to show just the executives.
In the above example, the secondary filters are configured to show:
- Users who are Employees
- Members of the Executive Team department
We can see that all two executives are using the intranet, and their engagement somewhat matches the baseline: 2 visits per day, and 23 minutes (versus 18 min baseline).
You can continue this exercise to try and figure out which departments or locations the intranet is not reaching effectively.
Returning to the same metrics in the future helps you track if efforts to increase intranet adoption are having an effect. To make it easier to track results over time, you can click “Save As” button in the secondary filter to save the filter options as a Saved Dashboard.
3. Check for specific people not using the intranet
To check for people not using the intranet, following the above instructions for Tip: Use People Export to Find Inactive Accounts.