Measurement, metrics, or analytics: Which is it?
Measurement, metrics, and analytics. Do all of these terms refer to the same things? Or are these distinct ideas? In the simplest sense:
- Measurement is the process of measuring something, often to answer a specific question or assess the effectiveness of messaging.
- Metrics are raw data collected and typically evaluated against a stated goal. In internal comms, metrics are often generated when someone interacts with content (reads, clicks, downloads).
- Analytics is the systematic analysis of metrics—the outcomes of analyzing patterns and trends across metrics.
Measurement vs Metrics vs Analytics
Here’s what this might look like. Let’s say you host a monthly dinner party. Every month, you send an invite to ten people and want to know: Was my invitation effective?
Measurement is the act of measuring. You measure how many invitations you send, how many RSVPs you receive, if and when you send reminder texts, and how many people attend each dinner party.
Metrics are the results of your measurement. You note the following:
- Dinner one: nine people RSVP’d yes, you sent reminder texts two days before the event, eight people attended
- Dinner two: ten people RSVP’d yes, you sent day-of reminder texts, seven people attended
Analytics is what you do with those metrics. You look across the numbers and start to notice patterns:
- Friends who receive an earlier reminder text are more likely to attend
- Weeknight invites have a lower turnout
Now you’re learning why things happened and how to optimize attendance.
What is internal communications measurement?
Internal communications measurement is the act of measuring messages sent by internal comms, HR, or leaders to employees. Measuring internal comms can tell teams whether employees pay attention to their messages, understand the content, trust the sender, and take the intended action (e.g., read, view, enroll, attend).
What is email measurement?
One of the most popular content types that internal comms teams measure is email. With PoliteMail, teams can measure the effectiveness of their employee messaging and use the findings to optimize their content and boost employee engagement and participation.
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What are internal communications metrics?
Internal comms metrics are quantifiable measurements used to assess the success of your content. Common internal comms metrics include:
- Open rate: The percent of recipients who open a message.
- Attention rate: PoliteMail’s attention rate measures whether recipients of an email actually spend meaningful time viewing the message (the calculation ignores opens that last only a few seconds). These metrics help you determine whether employees are genuinely paying attention to the content.
- Click-through rate (CTR): For content (email, intranet) containing a link, CTR is the percentage of recipients or viewers who click the link.
- Read time (or time on page): This measures how long an employee spends viewing a message (email, intranet page). With PoliteMail, read time can be compared with the time it should take to read the content.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who enter a website and leave (“bounce”) after viewing only one page, without interacting further.
- Employee feedback: Employee thoughts gathered through surveys, focus groups, or informal discussions.
What are internal communications analytics?
Analytics is the analysis of metrics—the outcomes of analyzing patterns, trends, and relationships across metrics. Given an internal comms metric like attention rate, a team can begin to understand which content employees engage with and which content goes ignored. These analytics can guide content strategy—giving teams a rationale for staying the course with content that’s consistently working, and highlighting areas where the team should rework content that is falling flat.
Some high-value internal comms analytics include:
- Content effectiveness. Using metrics such as open rate, attention rate, and read time, teams can analyze which content consistently earns attention and which messages are opened but only skimmed. This analysis can help teams distinguish between content that looks successful and content that’s actually being read.
- Channel performance. Using CTR, teams can analyze whether employees click through from an email or Teams message to the intranet, and then analyze bounce rates for respective pages. This analysis can help the team determine whether each channel is being used effectively.
- Audience and targeting effectiveness. Using open and attention rates and CTRs, teams can analyze content engagement, segmented by department, role, location, or shift. This can reveal inconsistencies across teams and highlight more effective approaches.
How metrics and analytics work together
Metrics provide the raw information, serving as the foundation for your insights. Analytics make metrics mean something. They put a brain to the numbers, helping explain the value of the measurement, and ultimately, what you should do next. Hand-in-hand, metrics and analytics help you make better, more strategic decisions.
How PoliteMail provides metrics
PoliteMail provides Metric Reports that include metrics like attention rate, click-through rate, effective rate (CTR/opens), engaged reads (recipients who open a message for over 50% of the content length), messages that were likely forwarded, and more.
These reports can help teams compare their email metrics to company and industry benchmarks, compare message performance across regions and departments, visualize email engagement with a HeatMap feature, and more. Ultimately, these Metrics Reports compile the most valuable data points, making it easier to analyze message performance and understand the why behind the numbers.
Beyond this, PoliteMail’s Advanced Analytics Dashboard goes even further—enabling internal communicators to sync PoliteMail email metrics in real time with Excel and Microsoft’s Power BI, allowing for custom-built dashboards, live data sharing, and deep engagement analysis.
Learn how our internal email software empowers communicators with data-driven insights on employee engagement.
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