IMHO, one insightful and actionable information that can be extracted from UGC measurement is the crawlability of the website.

For example, I can track the number of comments-documents-folders created by users and see if they are affecting the crawlers’ rate in the website. It is known that the more content, the more crawlable the website (of course this is not the only parameter, but it is an important one). Moreover, I track if more people are coming from Search Engines as a result of higher indexing and analyze the performance of these additional people in the website.

How does it sound?

IMHO, one insightful and actionable information that can be extracted from UGC measurement is the crawlability of the website.

For example, I can track the number of comments-documents-folders created by users and see if they are affecting the crawlers’ rate in the website. It is known that the more content, the more crawlable the website (of course these are not the only parameters, but they are important ones). Moreover, I track if more people are coming from Search Engines as a result of higher indexing and analyze the performance of this additional people in the website.

How does it sound?

Thanks Jim. As a fellow data junkie, I like to know as much as can (even if it’s just “nice” :). I also think the model speaks to actionability. Like I mentioned to Daniel above, by understanding the types of contributions and content, you can start to build the “platform” for UGC creation. By looking at the ratios of contributions, comments, or the impact of personas, you can promote key content creators and their output to prominent areas on the site, enabling them to have a stronger voice for driving your revenue model. One could tailor site effectiveness (persuasion architecture anyone?), and begin to identify content syndication networks and affiliate relationships. With value scoring, you also lay the groundwork for propensity modeling.

Thanks Todd! As a person who employees hybrid data collection (tag and logs), I think you bring up an excellent point that many web analytics vendors can’t accomplish: the detection and reporting of spider and bot activity. Certainly, a good SEO knows how the bots are (and are not) indexing the site. It seems logical to me to extend such non-human traffic metrics to UGC in context with how your site ranks in the SERP’s for keywords in the content of the pages with your UGC that crawled by bots. Thanks for sharing your ideas! And welcome to the blogosphere!

In my most humble of opinions I’d say that these are nice to know, better to trend, and it would seem that this analysis could trigger any number of usability and marketing actions. From there, for the most part the usual suspects of web analytics apply.

Thanks again Judah for the detailed UGC post!

Question is, after you have the metrics and trends, what do you “do* with them, how do you *take action* against them to improve them?

Or are they just “nice to know”?

very interesting post, this is something that I have been studying a lot. I am the Web Analyst/SEO manager for http://www.esnips.com and UGC is our core business.

eSnips members can upload and share any file type from their profile, in folders representing different areas of interest, and can determine the audience for each folder. eSnips has approximately 7 million public pages divided in the following way: 2.2 million profiles (one for each registered user), 4 million public files, and 1 million public folders. All of this is UGC.

Three important categories of metrics that IMHO are really important to be measured are:

1- Quantity of content uploaded: be it in the form of files, folders, descriptions, or comments [increases traffic and overall content].

2- Content linkability: through comments, favorites, widgets, or bookmarks [increases ENGAGEMENT (this one is for Eric :-)].

3- Content strength: text that matches the business objectives and audience desired by the company (in other words, content containing targeted keywords that will be crawled by Google/Yahoo/… and indexed highly in their search).

All three categories above help increasing SEO and engagement of existing users. Does it make sense to you?