How to Measure Intranet Engagement

You’ve poured time into crafting SharePoint news posts. But if they’re not sparking action, what’s the point?

Whether you’re trying to boost engagement, justify budget, or refine your content strategy, the right analytics tool can make all the difference.

Start with SharePoint’s Built-In Tools. But Know Their Limits

SharePoint Analytics and Microsoft 365 reports offer a decent starting point. You’ll get page views, likes, and comments, but that’s where the story ends. These tools are great for a quick pulse check, but they fall short when you need deeper insights.

• Delayed reporting: Real-time decision-making is tough when analytics are slow to update.
• Surface-level metrics: While more metrics have recently been added you don’t get depth. The analytics are still high level with focus on views, likes and comments. More in-depth engagement data (such as time spent reading or scroll depth) is not yet standard.
• Limited segmentation: Segmentation is limited and struggles to drill down into detailed demographics or roles (department, role, location). For example, you cannot drill down to see if frontline staff in Victoria are engaging with a safety update.
• Minimal historical data: The new long-term data feature is helpful, but older insights can be hard to access.
• No forecasting: You won’t find predictive trends or suggested optimisations.
• Power BI integration hurdles: You’ll need workarounds or third-party tools to get SharePoint data into dashboards for useful visibility and reporting to your team.

Want Deeper Behavioural Data? GA4 Has It (With Caveats)

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives you the gold standard in behavioural data: user journeys, scroll depth, button clicks, and more, all in real time. You can segment by location, device, or traffic source to see how your content performs.

But GA4 wasn’t built for intranets. Tracking authenticated Microsoft 365 users requires custom setups, admin access, and raises privacy concerns. It’s powerful, but not plug-and-play.

See What Users Actually Do With Microsoft Clarity

Want to know where users scroll, click, or drop off? Clarity gives you heatmaps and session recordings that reveal friction points and layout issues. Bonus: it integrates smoothly with SharePoint Online.

Limitations? It doesn’t track likes or comments, segmentation is minimal, and performance can vary on single-site setups. But paired with GA4, it’s a powerful combo.

For High-Stakes Comms, Go Enterprise

If you need governance and role-based insights and executive dashboards, tools like SWOOP Analytics, TyGraph, and CardioLog  are your best bet. These platforms offer:

• Deep segmentation by department, role, or location
• Executive dashboards
• Compliance monitoring
• Content health scoring

They’re ideal for complex or regulated environments and provide the analytics maturity that free tools can’t match.

How the Tools Stack Up

Not all analytics tools are created equal. Here’s a quick comparison to help you decide which ones are worth your time:

Ready to close the engagement gap?

Start by reviewing your existing analytics, then choose a tool (or combo) that fits your team’s needs. Whether you’re just getting started or ready to scale, the right data will help you prove impact, and improve it.