Web Site Measurement Hacks

Measure Your Intranet or Extranet

Companies collectively spend billions annually on intranet and extranet projects but often fail to take the extra step in justifying the expenditure and ensuring that employees and business partners are actually using available tools.

While public web sites get all the limelight, many enterprises have internal and business-customer facing sites that merit measurement as well. These can be intranets—sites for use by the organization’s members that can be accessed from within the premises of the organization only—or extranets— secure web sites for the organization’s members or its affiliates that can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet, but require password authentication. The essence of measuring traffic to your internal sites is to ensure that the right people are using the right resources the right way. Regardless of the type of site, there is significant value in measuring the use of these types of sites, mostly derived from cost justification and usage patterns.

Justifying Return on Investment

Intranets and extranets often require significant effort and expenditure to create and maintain. One approach you can use to justify these costs is to quantify the savings associated with having people self-serve information from your internal sites.

For example, you may wish to quantify the time and effort associated having to take phone calls instead of having your business partners self-serve through your extranet. To do this, you would run web measurement ...