How to track and analyze your BuddyPress member activity
Do you want to know who your most active BuddyPress members are, or perhaps who the most recently active members of your community are. In this tutorial, we are going to see how to use the activity tracking functionality of Users Insights to search and analyze your members by their BuddyPress activity. First, we will see how to measure the member activity and how to use the different activity metrics to search and analyze your BuddyPress community members.
How do we track BuddyPress activity
There are many ways to track and measure the activity on your community website. One way is to simply track your members’ content creation. This will include the comments, groups created, as well as the number of activity updates. Another way to measure the member activity is by how often they visit your community website. For this we will use the activity tracking features of the Users Insights WordPress plugin.
Here are some of the things that we can track with Users Insights:
- Number of activity updates
- Number of sessions
- Last seen activity
- Number of groups created
- Number of groups belonging to
- Number of friends
Getting started
For this tutorial, we are going to use the BuddyPress module that is bundled with the Users Insights plugin. This module extracts and adds various BuddyPress-related member information into the Users Insights user table. We are also going to use the “Number of Sessions” and the “Last Seen” features that come by default with Users Insights. So, before we get started, just make sure that you have the BuddyPress module active on your installation. You can activate and deactivate the different Users Insights modules via the Module Options page under the Users Insights menu.
Finding the most active visitors of your BuddyPress community
The “Number of Sessions” field that the Users Insights plugin adds, counts the number of times a specific user has visited your site (while logged in). We can use this information to find the members who most actively visit our community website. This can be a useful information because it shows the people who are actively monitoring your community activity no matter if they are participating in the creation of the content or in the interactions with other members. If you want to see who the most active visitors of your community are, just click on the number of sessions field in the Users Insights table. This will sort your member list in a descending order with the most active visitors on the top of the list.
Since the sessions field is also available in the smart filters, you can use this data to filter your members by the number of sessions. For example, here are all the members of your BuddyPress community who have visited our website more than 20 times.
The same filter can be used to find your least active BuddyPress members. For example, you can list all the members who have visited your website less than 5 times.
Finding the members with the most activity updates
The user activity updates field shows how many times a member has updated his activity stream. This usually includes information like blog posts, new friends, blog comments, group updates, etc. The BuddyPress module of Users Insights makes this information available in the Users Insights table and filters. Unlike the number of sessions field, this field shows us who are the most active content creators in the community. In a similar way like the previous example, if you want to see the members with most activity updates, you can just sort the user table by the activity updates field.
You can also use the smart filters to segment your member list by the number of activity updates they have. Foe example, to find the least active users you can apply a filter “Activity Updates is less that 20”.
Finding the most recently active members
The “Last Seen” field shows you the time when a specific member has last visited your website (when logged in). Every time a member visits your website, the date and time of the visit is stored in the “Last Seen” field for this member. This can be an useful information if you want to find the members of your community who haven’t been online for a while. Here is an example of all the members of our community that haven’t visited our website in the last month:
If you want to see the most recently active members, you can just sort you member list by this field. For the currently online members, Users Insights will show a green dot next to their username on the table.
The BuddyPress module also adds a few other fields that can be useful for finding the most active members of your community. For example, you can filter your members by the number of BuddyPress groups that they belong to or the number of groups that they have created.
Or you can use the number of friends field to find the members with the most/least friends in your community.
Combining the activity information to create custom segments
Because the Users Insights filters are stackable, you can use multiple filters at once. This means that you can further filter your member list to get more specific segments of your members. Let’s see some examples.
Here is a segmented list of all the members of your BuddyPress community that have been online in the last 30 days and have more than 10 activity updates:
Another interesting segment will be one that shows a list with the least active members. Here is an example of a segment that has all the members who haven’t visited our website in the last 30 days, have less than 30 activity updates and have visited our website less than 5 times:
If we want to try to re-engage these members, we can use the export feature of Users Insights and import this segmented user list into an email campaign service, like MailChimp and create a re-engagement email campaign.
As you can see, having a tool to track and analyze your members’ activity can be very useful to better understand and improve your community. We hope that this article was useful and that it will help you with the organization and management of your online community.