Hello Community Members and Experts,
We have just completed a relaunch of our community (yea!) and were looking for some KPI’s that can be measured easily with out of the box Discourse tracking.
Does anyone have any samples they can share with us?
Thank you, Sara
Hey Sara, good question. I think it’s important to start with business objectives - what is the goal of the community? Ticket deflection? Brand advocacy?
That will define which metrics make the most sense to track.
Regardless of the above, the one that I recommend everyone tracks is DAU/MAU (or stickiness). That demonstrates how frequently people come back, which is primarily indicative of health. Aim for 20-30%.
Our latest blog post might also be interesting: A Strategy For Making the Most of Community Health Metrics
Except when the role of a forum is purely support and ticketing, because then high DAU/MAU isn’t telling healthy and active community, but issues of that product 
@HAWK I don’t understand the blanket recommendation to shoot for a 30% DAU/MAU given that there are all kinds of communities.
Ours is not a “let’s talk about sports”-type community but a “I’m facing X problem” kinda community. Given that, happy users are likely not to come back soon.
So shouldn’t the target (or the target metric?) vary by community type?
I was going to add that caveat but I don’t fully agree. You need critical mass of returning members unless you have a large team that can resolve all support requests. This forum is a support community and stickiness is important.
To a degree yes. But if you want one fundamental metric, that would be the one I’d choose.
This forum is an example of open source project. And even here most of topics are some kind issues but situation is very much different than let’s say what one UK based and originally from Germany, but globally operating ”pseudo credit cards” selling company has. They have just complaints and issues that anykind community can’t solve out and there is nothing to discuss — as we are doing now. And it is not the only example of that kind.
My bold claim is that most of company supports are just happy if they have very low rate of returning users
Sure I was triggered by one and only phrase here:
Generally you are absolutely right. Returning visitors are essential for discussion and DAU/MAU is good metrics for that. But it can be a little bit problematic too, like bounce rate on websites. Almost everybody thinks it is automatically bad, but if an user got an answer and bounces after reading/listening/watching it generates higher bounce rate that should count as good thing. Regardless of a bounce that site fullfilled its purpose and out there is one happy user/customer. The issue here is, of course, we don’t have any metrics to measure that.
So, we are at same page here. I have just too much free time because all of my customers are on long vacation 
Just to confirm is the daily calculation # of logged in users that day/ total logged in users in the previous calandar month or is the daily total devided by total users over the previous 30 days?