No matter the size of your website, commenters tend to be a smaller subset of your audience. But they’re also often among your most loyal readers who are the most engaged. Wouldn’t it be great to know something about those people? That’s what Disqus is trying to nail with a new Analytics offering.
While it’s still in its early stages, the key to Disqus Analytics is that it’s very simple to use and pull meaningful data from. You’ll not only be able to see who your most loyal commenters are, you’ll be able to see the topics that are clearly the most important when it comes to engagement with your audience. And you can get data about which posts or people are most often “liked” and which login method your commenters are using to leave comments on various types of posts.
As some of you have noticed, we just turned on Disqus comments a few days ago. So far, the system is excellent. That on top of more community management should hopefully keep the trolls at bay. We’ll see. With these analytics though, at the very least we’ll know something about the trolls.
There are four key areas to the service right now: “Snapshot,” “Activity,” “People,” and “Network.” From Disqus:
The Snapshot page is a quick glance at your community’s pulse. You’ll see interesting facts, helpful numbers, and current activity trends. The Activity page serves as the detailed view for all the activity being generated in your community. Under People, you’ll learn more about your audience than just from looking at numbers and percentages. Finally, the Network page is meant to show how your community benefits from being connected to the largest platform of its kind on the web.
The Network area is particularly interesting because of Disqus’ massive and growing usage. There are nearly 150 million people around the world now that use Disqus on a monthly basis.
Disqus notes that they’re currently in the process of testing this Analytics package with a few of their communities, and they’ll be slowly rolling it out more over time. They’re looking for alpha testers, so visit here if you’re interested.
