Web analytics tools for intranet helps you to see how traffic is going on your website. This is important for many different reasons. I’ll try and cover a few of those reasons here, but before we begin you should take a quick moment to read the “Top 5 Tips for Using Web Analytics Data” at http://www.wijmo.com/blog/using -web-analytics-data.
In this post, we are going to review all the tools available for web analytics, that can help companies to improve their intranets. Intranets have been used by companies across the globe in order to connect its employees as well provide them with resources and information. One of the best ways for an intranet success is to have solid web analytics tools in place. Such kind of tools will enable better understanding of how its employees use its internal resources. Today, with so many technological advancements taking place, it is even more important to review which one of those tools will be able to provide us with accurate data and analysis.
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You can stay secure, respect the privacy of your team and reduce risk by not signing away the data of your internal websites and intranet apps. Matomo also makes it easy to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.
When you use Intranet Analytics through Matomo On-Premise, all the data is stored on your own servers in a location of your choosing. You won’t run the risk of your highly sensitive internal data or communications being compromised, as is possible if hosted by a third-party.Contact us!
What’s the risk of using a third-party solution for your internal websites and apps?
Security issues would be the biggest risk you take for using a third-party solution. When using a third-party analytics provider like Google Analytics for your intranet, you run the risk of losing control of your data because that information sent to Google is saved on their servers. You don’t get a say on where it’s stored and won’t be told where to locate all your data. Nor can you control who accesses your data which poses a risk since anyone can take advantage of it. You won’t even be able to put extra measures in place to ensure your private and sensitive information is securely stored. Without that control, you’re leaving your vulnerable info in the hands of an external party. This is why ensuring your data isn’t in the hands of a third-party is incredibly important.
Tools for intranet analytics
To get started on the subject of intranet analytics I thought some suggestions of tools and products may do the trick. These tools gather the data, get the statistics sorted out and work with analytics for your intranet, or extranet, perhaps.
Intranet analytics
It’s worth mentioning that my book, Web Strategy for Everyone, covers a lot of aspects of intranets and the digital workplace, such as the information architecture, performance optimization and design principles like design with data. Check it out, it only cost you ten bucks ›
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry-standard on the public web and is also used by many organizations on their intranets.
Piwik
Piwik is a open source alternative for those who don’t want to share data on their users behaviour. Piwik offers a demo you can check out here. Piwik is also capable of crunching server-logs, so there is not really necessary to use client-based techniques for tracking visitors.
IBM Unica NetInsight
Unica is designed to be used on-premise instead of cloud-based solutions like Google Analytics that leak visitor data to third parties.
Read more about Unica NetInsight »
IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics Web Analytics)
Offers, among other features, comparative benchmarks and knowledge of how the best performers reach their successes.
View screenshots of Digital Analytics etc at IBM.com »
Angelfish Web Analytics for Intranets
Web analytics software which can be installed on-premise (ie. within your network) to control collected data. Sometimes intranet/extranet analytics need to store customer data and other sensitive information most prefer to keep close.
Woopra
How do the users engage with the intranet?
NextSTAT Web Analytics & Traffic Statistics
Hosts the solution for you and all you do is put a tracking-code on your pages.
GoStats
Got hit counters as well as website analytics.
Chartbeat
Lists some major publishing firms as their customers.
Webtrends Reinvigorate
Works with realtime data and heatmaps.
GoSquared
Claims to be the simplest analytics in the world.
Clicky Real Time Web Analytics
You can inspect an individual visitors journey on your intranet. Live demo here.
gauges
Provides an overview to see all websites on a single page.
HitsLink Web Analytics
Visual presentation of a website’s performance. Public demo can be found here.
VisiStat
Offers proactive tools on where to make improvement of your pages. Public demo here.
Webtrends
Founded 1993 and support multi-channel measurement.
Read more about Webtrends at webtrends.com »
Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture)
More on Adobe Analytics at adobe.com »
AWStats Log Analyzer
Open source tool that analyzes the web server logs and display the data on a web page. Used at lots of web hosting firms.
Check out AWStats at Sourceforge.com »
OneStat
Services starting at 125 USD per year.
Crazy Egg
Tracking user behaviour made simple with Crazy Egg.
ClickTale
Records users sessions on the intranet for you to analyze.
Optimizely
Perform A/B-testing or multivariate testing on your intranet.
Heap
Instant and also retroactive analytics on your data.
Snowplow Analytics
Snowplow Analytics main feature is as an event data pipeline, which makes it ideal to track users on multiple channels – perfect for digital workplace analytics!
Cardio Analytics for Sharepoint and Office 365
Designed specifically for Microsoft SharePoint, Cardio Analytics stands by the belief that a business can only manage what it measures. These measurements aims to play a huge role in savings, productivity and overall success. Analytic reports are shown in a simple and easily understood fashion. Available in on-prem as well as cloud-based solutions.
How can you discover your intranet dysfunctionality?
The first step is to understand what’s really going on. You do use analytics tools for your website, right? Implementing an intranet analytics solution can provide you with all the information you need to optimize your organization’s collaborative space. The same rules about making empirical, data-driven decisions apply to both front-facing and internal online resources.
This post will highlight some of the problems typically experienced by companies and other organizations deploying intranets and collaboration platforms like SharePoint and Confluence. Then we’ll try to suggest what can be done using analytics to get a grip on those issues.
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1. Disproportionate contribution levels
It happens in every company with an intranet: there are a lot more takers than givers. In other words, many more people will read content than produce content for your company’s intranet pages.
Two obvious conclusions should be drawn from this: first, you need to identify your top contributors and find a way to reward them. These champions are a tremendous help to your organization, and they deserve recognition.
The second conclusion is one that requires a little more consideration: you are failing to make the most of your employees’ knowledge! Our rule of thumb tells us that 4 of 5 employees are not sharing enough of their experience, expertise, and unique knowledge that has the potential to make your company better.
How can intranet analytics help me fix this problem?
Analytics can help you identify and track the individuals who are making the biggest impact on your organization. Customization of reports and data will generate statistics on document authors, wiki editors, and top commenters to see where your content is coming from. By the same token, you can determine where you have gaps in your intranet resources and who isn’t sharing expertise.
Careful analysis of intranet analytics reports should give you a good start on creating action points that ultimately lead to content generation. If your reports show that the HR department isn’t producing content, you can cross-reference this with search data analytics and task someone with writing a handbook to answer common questions.
Give the job to a person or a small group of people who haven’t contributed before, and assign a “mentor” from among your champions to help them. Including more people in the content creation process will improve results and give all of your employees a chance to place their expertise at the disposal of co-workers.
2. Clutter is making your websites unusable!
Lots of teams, lots of websites, lots of documents crowding up things.
If there’s too much junk, old content, or otherwise less-than-useful pages lying around, this will make navigation cumbersome and unpleasant. Think of it like your email inbox: when there’s too many spam messages in there, it stops being useful. Clutter kills email.
Your internal pages are similar: too much junk will make them unusable. Use intranet analytics to figure out how you can cut the fat and keep the lean meat.
And if you think we’re making this up, well, we’re not: the 2013 study by Interact titled Interact Intranet Customer Analysis Survey demonstrated that in organizations without well-designed intranets, 1 out of 5 working days is wasted just looking for the information needed to get the job done.
[tweet]1 out of 5 working days is wasted just looking for the information needed to get the job done.[/tweet]
How can analytics help me fix this problem?
The entire reasoning behind using analytics for your intranet platforms is to capture levels of user engagement.
If your analytics data tells you that visits to a particular page are steadily decreasing over time, review the content and decide whether it needs updating, archiving, or simply removal.
This should be a regular process, something done by a team that uses reliable analytics data to see where you can remove barriers to information.
3. People can’t find the information they need!
The primary purpose of company intranets and collaboration platforms like SharePoint and Confluence is to collect information and make it easily accessible.
Knowledge is power, and knowledge at employees’ fingertips means increased productivity, which translates into better business results.
The architecture of your intranet should make it as easy as possible to find information without getting lost or frustrated. If it takes too much time to find an important document, users get discouraged and abandon their search.
How can intranet analytics help me fix this problem?
Helping your users is a simple proposition: make the journey to the resources they need as painless as possible.
“Pain” when browsing an intranet means going through too many pages to find a resource. Search results data might tell you that a resource is buried too deeply.
If everyone’s looking for the same thing using your intranet search engine (similar or identical search terms), maybe that content isn’t easy enough to find just by clicking from the point of entry. Search phrase statistics can give you a clue as to what isn’t exposed enough.
Another idea is discovering broken links that frustrate users by using this Piwik PRO ninja tip: set the “404 page not found” error message as a goal in your Piwik PRO instance. Then use click path reporting to see what brought users to this non-existent resource. Now you know where to fix your web pages to avoid users running into walls when trying to find information.
4. Users aren’t doing the things we need them to do!
Intranets are also key tools for disseminating information across large organizations. Perhaps there’s a message from senior management or general counsel that everyone in the company needs to be familiar with.
Perhaps new policy documents applicable to broad swathes of your workforce have just been put up. Or you may have placed an important employee satisfaction survey somewhere in SharePoint.
You might think it’s obvious that employees need to see these things, but they don’t necessarily feel it’s so obvious.
How can intranet analytics help me fix this problem?
Track logins and page views, and treat key content and important pages like conversions. Use an analytics tool which allows you to set goals and follow events so you can monitor exactly the content you think is important, and then observe how it performs.
If you have completion of a survey form as a goal, you can use funnel tracking to determine where and why users drop out of the conversion path.
By applying segmentation, you can then learn if there is a certain class of users underperforming. For example, in a global organization it could be the case that your English-language survey is too hard for employees in Romania or Brazil to understand because they drop out of the survey after the second page of instructions.
Conclusion
What are the best web analytics tools for intranet? Web analytics is a powerful tool that can help you increase your website traffic efficiently and precisely. The enterprise level software solutions can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year, while many enterprise solutions will provide deep insights into websites and intranets.