When I work with clients, one of the key things they want to understand is how they track community growth and react to the data they are seeing. This can be a complex business: community platforms provide bazillions of metrics. Which ones should you track? Or, should you track them all?
Definitely don’t track everything. That is a fast-track to driving yourself bonkers.
Much to the chagrin of metrics nerds, tracking too many things can be a distraction. A better approach is to decide on a key set of dimensions and track those things effectively. Focus less on the number of graphs and more what you want to learn from the data.
Today I want to recommend what some of these metrics should be. For the purpose of this article, I am using Discourse as an example; they are a platform I commonly I use with clients.
The graphs you will see below are from a client of mine who are running a fairly specialist niche technical community that pre-launched late last year (who gave me permission to anonymously share the graphs). This are early stages for the community, but I think they are making great traction and these these graphs are illustrative of what you might want to measure and how you evaluate the data.
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