Monitoring and Analytics: How To Find The 5 W’s Of Your Community

Your online community isn’t just about the engaged users, but also your Lurkers. How do you find out what they want though?

Monitoring a community seems pretty straight forward when you have active discussions occurring, but because the majority of users will never actually post a comment or tell you their story you must get creative to understand their needs.

We already know that the Adaptive Structuration Theory suggests that online community members not only want a tool that is easy to use for communicating, but also for those tools to evolve around their needs. For that reason it is important to note what all users want from the community, and that is why analytics are incredibly important in finding this information.

Join us Thursday, February 16 at 9 pm EST for our final session. Guest speaker – Govloop’s Community Manager Lauren Modeen.

The 5 W’s – Who, What, Where, When and Why

Online community tools such as Buddy Press, Drupal, WordPress, Ning and a plethora of others have built in plugins or applications that make it easy for people to moderate and collect information on their users (without breaking the users trust or your policies). By using internal analytic tools you can monitor from the inside out.

Who: Analytic tools like Google’s free app will allow you to identify information such as where a person is from, what browser they use, what sites they come from, and what types of content they look at the most on your community. By taking a look at common keywords and content you can infer what types of content do well, and if you should generate more discussions around it.

What: Your members and users can be identified based upon their actions. Data will show you whether they are returning or new users, if they are sharing your content to their social networks, and if they are logging in or creating profiles. This information will allow you to figure out what role they play in your ecosystem, and if you need to adjust your methodology or increase tools that would benefit the greater population.

Where: To identify where your members are coming from, and where they are leaving your site there are several options. The first place to look is at your referral traffic, followed by the identifying the keywords that people search for and organically bring them to the community. You can also create funnels on registration pages to see where people drop off and give up on the process, or other forms that span over a series of pages. When looking from the outside in, tools like AddThis will allow you to see what content was shared to what social network, and how many people came back to the community as a result.

When: During strategy building, ad placement planning, and campaign development it is important to note when your community gets the most traffic. If there are stronger periods of traffic it may be ideal to place external campaigns around that time; however, if you are seeking to build up traffic during slowed periods this data will also be just as useful.

Why: There are several additional questions that come with the Why of monitoring and analyzing your communities data. Such as “Why are people not engaging? Why are people sharing specific content more than other types? Or Why was there a spike in traffic?” The data from your internal analytic tool will allow you to easily find this information.

External Monitoring Tools

Clearly there are several internal monitoring and analytic tools that are free, and all the same there are some great options for monitoring your external community as well. The following video will highlight how you can track conversations on Twitter and Facebook, as well as find where your members or targeted audiences are already talking.