One of the most important functions of analytics is tracking member activity. This serves three purposes: tracking members who are excelling, finding members who are struggling, and preserving an audit trail of every action. Examining the activity of people who are using your digital workplace heavily can provide a lot of insight into what they see as the primary use cases and which workflows they return to, and you can learn and apply that information to your overall digital workplace strategy. Struggling members can teach you the same lessons, and help identify elements that aren't addressing their needs. Finally, the audit trail is essential, and ensures that every action can be traced to its source. 

Data Feeds has the answer to all of the questions, and much more. Google Analytics can't identify individual members, making it a better tool for analyzing traffic trends than people's activity. Workplace Analytics has a leaderboard that can pick out the top contributors in your digital workplace, but Data Feeds offers more functionality around filtering for particular members, as well as ranking by specific types of activity. It's the right tool for the job, and is easy to access through Microsoft Power BI. 

Who

Every member your digital workplace has ever had is held in the dUser table, which includes their name, email, the dates they were added and removed from your Igloo and, most importantly, their user_key. Everyone has a user_key, which is the number that all other tables refer to them as. It picks them out from all other members in your Igloo. The user_key attribute ties members to Groups, content, versioning, activity, and much more. 

What

To find out the details of what someone's been up to, use the user_key to query various f tables. F tables are fact tables, and log each view, like, and action that a member takes in your digital workplace. The tables are divided by content type, and have a column for each kind of action, so your query can be very granular. You can find a template that uses these tables effectively in the Analytics Knowledge Base, and it can be modified to suit your needs in Microsoft Power BI. 

How much

Rather than tracing the actions of a single person however, you might be looking for an aggregate of each member's actions. The RptCommunityUser table has you covered, giving you the action total for every member. RptCommunityUser stretches back for a year, while the RptCommunityUserMonth table offers insight into what actions each user takes each month. This can be great for identifying patterns where there are measurable increases in the activity of a particular team, or lulls that suggest a team isn't engaging deeply with your digital workplace. These insights can help you find opportunities to address the everyday challenges those teams are facing. 

Tracking member use is a vital part of understanding how people engage with your digital workplace, and can be an important part of maintaining the health, as well as making sure it's meeting everyone's needs. 

If you have other questions about analytics, data feeds, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.