SaaS community metric benchmarks

Hi Lais, sorry for the late reply - we missed this one. 

When it comes to community benchmarks, one of the first things we tend to say is that most metrics are not helpful when simply averaged across communities (that would be a very simple version of a benchmark).  That’s because there are simply so many influencing factors - like the type of product (and how customers interact with it), the industry vertical, the maturity of the community, the ecosystem within which the community exists, the chosen strategy, etc… For this reason, we usually don’t emphasise benchmarking for the majority of data points.  Think of things like page views, visitors and number of posts - benchmarks here are simply not helpful. 

On the other hand, we DO like to benchmark and determine best practice targets for what we call ‘health metrics’ - these are generally a small set of indicators of healthy community dynamics.  And they tend to be universally applicable regardless of the factors mentioned above.  Some examples might be:

• Topics with no reply (we recommend <5%)
• Questions with a marked best answer (we recommend >40-80%, depending on maturity)
• Best answers by peer (we recommend >40-80%, depending on maturity)

To paraphrase one of our VPs (yes I’m talking about you Tyler), a good benchmark is: “One where you understand the factors determining where you are today and know how you can improve over time”.