When you need to measure how many employees open your e-newsletter or use your intranet, the choices can seem confusing. How do you differentiate between clicks and opens? What’s a “unique visitor"? Does it matter how much time an employee spends visiting the intranet? 

To figure out what it all means, start by understanding the basics of e-metrics. Here’s a quiz to get you started:

True or false?

1. When it comes to email metrics, opens and clicks yield the same results.

2. A “page view” is the same as a “hit.”

3. Page views measure how many employees come to the intranet.

4. Unique visits measure how many employees come to the intranet.

5. Frequently searched terms tell you what information employees are looking for.

Answers:

1. FALSE. “Opens” measure how many employees open your e-newsletter and “clicks” indicate how many link to additional content found on your intranet. If your email platform provides this metric, consider both opens and clicks when evaluating how your e-newsletter is being read.

2. FALSE. Each time an employee visits a page on the intranet, that’s considered a page view. Hits are recorded for each object that loads during a page view. If a page has five images, for example, each of those images counts as a hit. So hits are not a useful metric.

3. FALSE. One employee can view many pages on a single visit. So you may have 3,000 page views, but just 500, 50 or even 5 (very enthusiastic) employees coming to your intranet.

4. TRUE. Many communicators use both unique visits and page views to measure intranet usages. “On Monday, we had 700 unique visitors, who were responsible for 5,500 page views.”

5. TRUE. This is a valuable way to understand the information employees seek, and to plan your web content accordingly.