If you pay your visitors’ salaries, then it pays to optimize

If you run an intranet or other web-based tool for your employees, you are in the unique position of paying people to use your website. If you are wasting their time, you are wasting your money!

Many larger companies have self-service websites where employees research their benefit offerings, reconcile their expense accounts, and book their own travel. And even smaller companies are embracing the intranet: a place where employees can find company policies, view documentation, open trouble tickets, and/or find employee contact details. These sites have one thing in common that requires a different approach from your external websites: You are paying the salaries of your site’s visitors, and their time spent equals your company’s money.

It’s often hard to justify advanced analytics or A/B testing on an intranet. If the site is instrumented at all, it’s often the case that someone “slapped some tags” on the site, and examination of the data ends at whatever standard reports are generated. However, if the company is large enough, then a good financial case can often be made for performing the same types of optimization efforts you practice on your external site. The larger the company, and the more expensive the workforce, the more compelling the case becomes.

Let’s consider a company with 5,000 employees — “unique visitors” in your web analytics tool — who use your intranet. Assume that on average, these employees visit twice per day, with an average visit duration of 1 minute. On a monthly basis, intranet usage represents over 3300 labor hours – not an insignificant amount. To put it in perspective, that’s roughly the equivalent of 20 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing the intranet!

Hours per Month Calculation

The dollar value put on those labor hours varies depending on company size, workforce skill and experience level, overhead costs, etc. If you don’t know the “wrap rate” (fully burdened rate that includes overhead, administration, etc. – usually 2-3 times an average hourly pay) used to estimate projects at your company, then $100/hour is good rule of thumb. It’s not unusual for very large companies to run higher than that, or for small/medium companies to run much lower, but it’s a nice round number that makes calculations easy.

Now let’s set a goal to shave 10% off the total visit hours each month by improving search or navigation on the site. For our example above, that’s a savings of 330 hours, or $33,000 per month. Potential savings of nearly $400,000 per year helps makes a compelling ROI argument indeed!

Note: For this analysis, it is especially important to know whether your analytics tool eliminates “bounced” (single-page) visits from your average visit duration calculation. That’s because the intranet is set as the home page for the default browser install within many companies, leading to a very high percentage of visits where only one page is viewed. I recommend you eliminate these visits from your calculations, since they don’t represent an optimization opportunity since people are just passing through on their way to another site.

Photo courtesy stock.xchng

Thomas Bosilevac Says:
December 28th, 2008 at 12:02 am

Great article! I manage the analytics service for the Intranet sites of a large multinational myself. Yes, just Intranet sites. You are right, in some cases this may only warrant the need to “slap a tag on it” and it does not get as fun as multi-variant testing, heat maps and campaign analysis. For organizations who spend millions (probably at least the fortune 1000) on their Intranet strategy, however, I can easily argue that a bit more care MUST be made, especially considering most organizations cannot use free tools such as Google Analytics. So let’s keep preaching for better Intranet stats!
Your article does a great job describing the start of Intranet valuation. How many people and how long do they spend. I place great caution though on the example to decrease this holistically. In a time where “shaving 10%” never meant more, this is a dangerous single metric to make into a KPI. The Intranet, if used wisely, can be an extremely valuable and cost-saving asset to the company. Instead of shaving off, perhaps increasing usage of such apps as client communication templates, call Center Deflection, etc is in the best interest to the bottom line.
While search may be an area where “time to find result” warrants a decrease, we have found many areas that we are now promoting due to the cost savings vs. “traditional” models involving too much people, paper and process.
Sorry for the rant, I was very excited to see a blog category specifially for Intranet analytics I had to comment away!

angiebb Says:
December 28th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

Thomas, thanks for you insights. It’s great that your organization does analytics on your intranet sites. That’s one area where many companies fall down, and terribly.

I completely agree with you that there are times when increasing time spent is actually better, and your examples are good. When I wrote the post, I was imagining a company that does little to no analytics on their intranet, and TOS is a quick and dirty way to get someone’s attention: enough to know that this stuff definitely IS worth analyzing, and it might not take much in terms of improvement to completely recoup whatever investment is made in analytics capabilities (people and/or tools).

I appreciate your comments!

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