Intranet adoption for its own sake does not prove very much. A high number of visitors shows that people opened pages, not that the intranet is doing its job. The purpose of an intranet is to align and engage employees with company culture, mission and values, to help them understand strategy and to help them find information. Those are the things we should be measuring.
Definitions
We define engagement in three ways: content consumption, content understanding and employee sentiment about the content they consume.
Content consumption.
Did the right people see the content, when and on what device? We measure:
- engagement by audience
- engagement by location
- journey tracking
- whether calls to action (CTAs) are followed
- engagement over time
- time and device hot spots
Content understanding.
Did employees understand what they read? No single metric proves this, so we look at what people did next. We measure:
- journeys
- search
- exit onwards, meaning where people go after leaving a page
- Viva Engage community participation and conversation reach
- behaviour patterns by department, audience and location
- dwell time
Employee sentiment.
How did employees feel about what they consumed? We measure likes, shares and the sentiment of conversation in Viva Engage.
Active/returning users
Active and returning users show whether employees come back to the intranet. On their own, these numbers are an adoption measure, so we read them alongside the three engagement measures above.
Our reports show new and returning visitors. Filtering by audience, department and location shows whether the groups who most need the content are the ones returning to it.
Frequency
Frequency shows how often employees visit. Our traffic reports show visit frequency and returning versus new visitors, and every report can be filtered by audience, department and location.
Frequency matters when the purpose of the content requires regular use. A policy or campaign that employees should return to is measured differently from a one-off announcement.
Time
We measure time in three ways.
- Engagement over time. Reporting periods are flexible, so you can match them to a launch, campaign or transformation programme instead of a fixed 7 to 90 day window.
- Time hot spots. Traffic reports show when employees are most active. For example, a leadership audience in Asia may create a 2 a.m. peak for editors in London, while frontline employees may peak at 7 a.m. when they clock on. This helps you publish when your audience is reading.
- Dwell time. This shows whether employees spent long enough with a page for meaningful reading to be plausible.
Our people reports also show engagement by device, so you can see which devices employees use.
Site comparison
We can report on a single page, one site, selected sites or the whole of SharePoint. This makes it possible to compare sites and to analyse related sites as one experience. For example, HR can combine an Employee Centre and a separate New Employee Onboarding site to see the complete employee journey.
Ranking views show the strongest and weakest performing content, so you can compare sites and pages on the same basis.
Launch measurement
A launch should not be treated as the finish line. We recommend setting a baseline before launch, tracking behaviour while the launch is live and comparing results over equivalent periods before and after.
For a new or redesigned intranet, compare engagement, findability and key journey completion before and after the change. Choose the audiences that matter for the launch and check that they were reached, not just that total visits rose.
Ignored areas
Ranking views, audience filters and content freshness reporting show the areas of the intranet that are being ignored:
- low-use content and sites
- content that has not been updated recently or within the expected timeframe
- locations, departments or audiences that are not engaging
- content employees look for but cannot find, shown by searches that return no results or are abandoned
Addin Analytics provides a report on how fresh content is. For the page, site or combination of sites you choose, it shows content that has not been updated recently or within the timeframe you expect. We treat that content as ignored. It needs to be updated, or archived or deleted if it is no longer needed.
For IT teams, this evidence also helps identify sites that can be retired, which helps search and Copilot work well and keeps storage costs down.
Improvement cycle
Measuring only helps if somebody acts on the result. The cycle is simple: set a goal and baseline, observe behaviour, interpret it, make a change, then measure again over a comparable period.
Examples of changes include rewriting content, improving a CTA, shortening a journey, adding the terms employees search for, targeting a follow-up at an audience that was missed, or retiring obsolete content. Saved views let teams return to the same pages, audiences and dates to check whether the change worked. We support this with monthly sessions after launch to review findings and agree priorities.
Limits
No single metric proves that an employee understood a message. Dwell time, journeys, search and sentiment are evidence, and we recommend reading them together rather than relying on one number.
Audience-level insight should be used within your own governance and access controls.