We've talked about analytics here before, but it's worth comparing the different methods of watching trends in your community's activity, popular content and areas, and how people are collaborating. Your Igloo has access to two different analytics platforms, Google Analytics, and the native Social Analytics. Each of them has distinct strengths. 

Social Analytics

The largest advantage of the social analytics feature is that it knows who your users are. It identifies activity and ties it to a specific person, including views, comments, content creation and file downloads. The Monthly Dashboard tracks activity over the last thirty days, and shows your most active people, hot spots of activity in your community, and dead zones that aren't seeing much action. You'll also get a view into the most social members of the community, people liking and commenting on the most content, which can be useful for communities where your Administrators create content, and people read and refine it. 

The member area tracks your growth in members, their most recent actions, and offers the full leaderboard, with reports available by Group, and extending back six months. The Content area tracks creation, popularity, and also the distribution of content in the community. If you have questions about where things are happening, the answers will be in there. Social Analytics are excellent for mapping trends in your community, and finding not just the most active areas, but the most active people.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics integration is easy to implement, and offers access to a robust analytics platform. You can use the Real Time data at any point during the day to see how many people are active in the community and where they're working. The Audience tab holds the demographics option, letting you see where those users are from, which proves useful for communities with people spread across offices or continents. The Site Content area shows a deep dive on each page in the community, including the amount of time people spent there, and total views vs. unique views, to determine whether people are consulting it multiple times, common for policies and procedures. 

Google Analytics is a fantastic resource for tracking page interaction and people by location and time, and supports setting up custom views and exports to easily answer frequent questions you have about what's going on in your community. Social Analytics, built to understand the structure of your community and the identity of people, can provide answers on social trends, active groups and spaces, and the favoured content types in your community.