How Often to Look at Metrics?

📈 Metrics & Measurement
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I’m just starting Community Discovery, and am looking at how to go about creating my first Minimum Viable Community. It’s a good idea to keep notes on what you do, and how it works out, but that requires breaking up what is often a continuous process into discrete segments.

For example, I’d love to start a newsletter, but how often do I note the results. Is it for every newsletter I send out? Once a month? Every X newsletters?

I want to be able to keep track of how things are going, so I can continue to adjust and play with the details, but I also want to give things a chance to prove itself so I don’t change things around too quickly.

So how much time, or at what frequency should you evaluate something to decide if you should keep going as is or adjusting something?

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You could try dividing your metrics into different categories like weekly, monthly, quarterly based on what type of content interaction you are trying to track. You mentioned about starting a newsletter, so do you plan to send it weekly or monthly? you can track the metrics based on that. In my previous company, we sent out a newsletter monthly and tracked it likewise. There are a few campaigns which run longer eg: ebook, you might use various strategies to promote it like ads, social media platforms and of course in the community. So this would take longer and so on. Hope this helps in someway. Would like to hear from others too :slight_smile:

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For me, I take the perspective of wanting to know ‘is what I’m doing now working and helping me towards where I want to be?’.

So, in the newsletter example, there the quantitative and qualitative aspect:

  • quantitative: is the list growing? is it enough? are people opening and clicking?
  • qualitative: what feedback am I getting? what is the quality of the people signing up? are people finding it valuable?

When starting you probably want to keep an eye on things daily/weekly, then as you get into a flow, it would become weekly/monthly. Then when there is stability it’s probably more monthly/yearly, but perhaps ensuring you don’t miss spikes in activity/traffic.

When you’re starting it’s crucial to keep an eye on data to help you understand what is or isn’t working, you probably want to stop what isn’t working quickly.

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