Congratulations – you’ve just made an important step in your SharePoint/Microsoft 365 Journey! By downloading CardioLog Analytics On-Prem, you’re on the right track towards gathering the necessary insights your organization needs to manage your intranet productivity and help you make data-driven business decisions. Getting started with SharePoint reporting doesn’t have to be overwhelming. In fact, we’ve created this guide to help you take simple, straightforward actions that will help you get the most value out of your trial.
Achieving all of your portal goals won’t be possible during your brief trial period, however – we can assist you in getting “quick wins”, by following a few simple steps. For this very reason, we’ve created this guide to help you:
- Understand your goals and what you’d like to achieve with SharePoint Analytics
- Take action to start building processes that will ensure success once you’ve implemented your SharePoint reporting solution in full
Step 1: Follow These Essential Analytics Steps
We recommend following three fundamental steps when beginning your analytics journey.
- Monitor – Tracking the usage within SharePoint and Microsoft 365
- Engage – Ask your users what their needs are, collect feedback via interactive surveys and message bars, and target your visitors in the right place with the right message with behavioral targeting
- Enhance – Utilize your feedback and metrics to take action, thus making the portal a more useful platform for your users
Step 2: Define your Portal Goals
Defining your portal goals is the first step you should take to put your efforts into perspective. By understanding where your challenges or weak spots lie in the portal, you’ll be able to select very tailored reports and metrics that will drive your digital workplace vision forward. To put things into perspective, we’ve grouped the most common challenges organizations and their users face when implementing SharePoint/Office 365 with the best metrics you can use immediately during your trial to help you see results.
If your specific challenge isn’t listed here, we’d be happy to hear about it and help you find a report to overcome it. You can simply contact us to let us know.
You can start taking action to achieve anything covered by these topics:
- Understanding your overall Usage – Get the Overview
- Increase User & Group Adoption Levels
- Build Knowledge & Boost User Engagement
- Enhance Usability
- Manage Portal Resources
- Engage with your Users & Collect Feedback
Step 3: Take Action Based on Your Insights
Understand Usage Basics – Get the Overview
Every beginning must start at the fundamental level. To get a basic idea of what your usage activity looks like in the portal, you should start here with the Usage Overview Report. With the usage overview report, you can see metrics that display data reflecting your portal content, adoption, and search.
Although this may seem like a lot of information, the report is organized so you can easily filter, and slice and dice your data to reflect any period of time or content type.
You can even drill down into various aspects of your data by utilizing the Portal tree filter where your entire portal hierarchy is displayed. You can very easily track multiple tenants and farms, like SharePoint Online and SharePoint Subscription Edition, SharePoint 2019. You can then drill down into your various sites, sub-sites, communities, and lists, all the way to the object level.
So there you have it. One dashboard to rule them all. Start drilling into your content, adoption, and search with this easy-to-use usage overview report. Read more on the next topics to focus your efforts and get the action tips you need to reach your goals!
Improve User & Group Adoption
Increasing adoption is one of the most critical challenges organizations face once they’ve rolled out SharePoint. Making an investment in SharePoint requires a huge allotment of resources, thus making ROI a top priority for senior management, stakeholders, and administrators. The key is simple: You can only manage what you measure. Once you’ve got the right adoption metrics set up, you’ll understand whether your users are obtaining value from the portal and if it’s serving as a productive professional platform.
Take action to increase New Visitors by:
- Sharing the portal with more users so they’ll get an email invite to the portal
- When collaborating with colleagues, encourage users to send links via the portal instead of email attachments. This creates a culture of sharing via the portal.
- Targeting your new visitors (within a specific period of time) with an email or popup asking them for feedback on their experience
Take action with Inactive User Adoption by utilizing the Active & Inactive Users report. Use these tips in conjunction with the report:
- Find out which users and groups are not using SharePoint often
- Decide which users and groups you’d like to allocate training to. (You may have a group that appears less active than the rest, yet once you drill-down into it, you’ll see that there may be very active users within that group, along with many inactive users.) Allocate your resources intelligently with the help of the drill-down feature.
- Identify your most active users and make use of their clout. Encourage them to share their knowledge with their teams, or reward them with special badges to display on their profiles
Build Knowledge & Increase User Engagement
Adding content to the portal is one of the main ways users can utilize the portal to collaborate, share ideas, and spread useful knowledge. Contributing content is a great way to make sure individuals’ knowledge is retained and spread to others, while also making sure everyone follows the same processes and procedures.
TIPS: How to encourage Content Contributions & User Engagement
- Check the Influential Content and Top Search phrase tables to see what sort of content visitors would like to see, and add content to reflect that
- Improve discoverability by adding links from articles to other relevant content on the portal homepage or department homesites
- Check the Top Exit Pages table to see which pages your users are more likely to leave. Improve the exit rate by adding additional links and content or reducing external links
- Enable likes and ratings so the positive feedback will encourage users to add more content
- Enable alerts so that users will get alerted when the content they created is modified
Optimize Portal Resources
TIPS – How to Optimize Your Portal’s Space Usage
Use the Portal Resources Report – Unused Content Report to detect unused content, and filter it by owner, creation date, and size. Once you’ve detected the largest elements in your portal that have the least amount of page views (or none at all!) you can simply contact the owners and decide whether to archive, remove, or boost via a homepage.
How to Enhance Your Portal Usability
Usability is a key component in improving your overall portal adoption and keeping your users engaged once they’ve entered the portal. If your users don’t like the user experience, they simply won’t use SharePoint as much. The most crucial element in enhancing usability is search. If users can’t find what they need, then the portal is not serving as a good use of their time, thus affecting productivity and creating user dissatisfaction.
TIPS – How to improve search effectiveness:
- Check the top search phrase table in the Search Optimization Report to understand what types of information visitors are seeking and which content cannot be easily found
- Add more content that may answer the search phrases that didn’t populate the results
- Improve discoverability by defining searchable managed properties in the search schema
- Improve search relevance by identifying high-quality pages
- Use query rules to improve search results
Engage with your Users and Collect Feedback
Turn your portal into an active experience with CardioLog Analytics’ sophisticated engagement tools. You can start taking action during your trial to collect valuable feedback that can transform the way you make decisions about your portal. Human insights are crucial for adapting your platform to the needs of your users.
TIPS – How to Engage with Your Users
- Implement surveys to solicit feedback. This opens a two-way communication path with your portal users, getting you the insights you need and at the same time, making your users feel valued and that their opinions are taken into consideration
- Communicate important company information through an interactive Message bar at the top of your site
- Personalize the user experience with behavioral targeting and customize the style and content of your portal according to the individual visitor type
If you would like any additional assistance in setting up your trial, or with building reports, feel free to reach out to contactus@intlock.com.
CardioLog Analytics offers advanced on-premise and SaaS SharePoint analytics solutions that are designed for businesses of all sizes. If you’re interested in optimizing your SharePoint portal, contact us to speak to one of our friendly team or find out more information about CardioLog Analytics here.
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