Overview

Community is the heart Stack Overflow, so we designed the dashboard to help you see how your team is engaging and using your site. The dashboard uses data and metrics to give you insights into:

The overall health and engagement of your team.
Who your top contributors are.
Which tags and topics are seeing the most activity.
How your internal marketing strategies are driving engagement over time.

Site administrators will also receive a weekly email with activity stats for the main site, including charts and lists similar to those on the dashboard.

NOTE: We use the generic word "community" in this article, not to be confused with Stack Overflow's Communities feature.

Access the dashboard

Access the dashboard by clicking Dashboard in the left-hand menu. You can also go directly to https://stackoverflowteams.com/c/[your_site]/metrics-dashboard.

NOTE: The Dashboard is available only on Stack Overflow for Teams Business sites (not Basic or Free).

For more information about the basic operation of the Dashboard, see the Dashboard end-user article. This article focuses instead on interpreting the Dashboard's metrics.

Site metrics and definitions

The enhanced dashboard contains a variety of metrics to help you assess the health of your Stack Overflow Team.

Charts

Interaction rate: Weighted average number of answers, votes, and comments per question.
Median time to answer: The median time it takes for a new question to be answered.
Questions: Total number of new questions asked over the selected timeframe, both from your Stack Overflow instance and any integrations.
Answer ratio: Percentage of questions answered (accepted + unaccepted). This is an average over the selected timeframe.
Unique visitors: Median daily users that have logged in over the selected timeframe. Each point shows the maximum daily visitors in the given time. Active users engage by taking an action (for example, asking a question). Passive users don't take any actions (for example, only reading).
Searches: Total number of searches over the selected timeframe, both from your Stack Overflow instance and any integrations.
Answers: Total number of new answers over the selected timeframe.
Edits: Total number of edits over the selected timeframe.

Lists

Tags trending up: Top tags increasing in use on new questions asked or answered over the selected timeframe.
Tags trending down: Top tags declining in use on new questions asked or answered over the selected timeframe.
Trending content: Most viewed questions and articles over the selected timeframe.
User breakdown: Top users broken down by number of questions, answers and reputation gain over the selected timeframe.

Download data

To download Stack Overflow dashboard data in .CSV format, click Download CSV in the upper-right corner of the page. This export file gives you the same data you see on the dashboard, including any date range or tag filters you've enabled. If you're filtering by a tag, you'll see the tag at the end of the file name (for example: ...tag_flowers.csv).

Interpret the data

Because every Team is different, it’s best to look at the trends within your Team as opposed to comparing metrics to others. Fluctuations in your metrics are to be expected as your Team grows and matures. Only when there are significant changes (or consistent negative trends) should you take action. Remember: you can reach out to your Stack Overflow customer success manager at any time to discuss the dashboard and how to understand and apply its reports.

Note: The Questions and Searches metrics also track activity in installed integrations. These charts can give you valuable insights into how your users are integrating Microsoft Teams or Slack into their Stack Overflow workflow.

Here are some ways the dashboard can give you insights into the health and engagement of your community.

Interaction rate shows how invested your users are in the community. A rate above 5 shows that your users are engaging with their peers, putting in time and effort to post content.

The Questions and Answers charts show engagement and activity within your community. Community size and maturity affect these metrics, so it’s important to look at them over time to ensure neither are dropping significantly.

Watch the Questions and Answers metrics when you've added new groups of users to the site, or after you launch awareness/engagement projects. Spikes in activity can indicate new groups are using the site and finding value in your Team, or that your marketing efforts were successful.

Median time to answer measures how quickly users are getting answers to their questions, and can be an effective indicator of return on investment (ROI). The quicker users receive an answer, the more efficient and productive they can be. Median time to answer should decrease as your Team matures, especially as users begin to effectively use integrations and webhooks.

Answer Ratio will become more important as your community matures. Use this metric to identify potential knowledge gaps or engagement issues. When filtering by tag, a high percentage of unanswered questions could indicate the need for more experts/users watching that tag (or a need for more webhooks or integrations). You’ll also want to look at your accepted answers rate, which should be above 40% to ensure users can always find the most helpful answers.

Daily Unique Visitors tracks the number of users logging in and using the site at least once per day. An upward trend or positive spike would indicate more users are making Stack Overflow a part of their daily workflow. A significant drop in visits may indicate a slower pace of new posts, or users gravitating towards other platforms (or old habits).

A positive trend in the Edits metric shows that your users are taking ownership and investing in the Team to improve its overall health. Similar to visits, negative trends here could mean there’s less new content to interact with.

The Searches metric is another effective way to measure ROI. More searches can indicate that your users see Stack Overflow as a source of truth in your organization. Comparing this metric to usage across other productivity tools can help you visualize user workflow, and may reveal older tools that are no longer needed.

Tags trending up and Trending content show you what content and topics have your community most engaged. Tags trending down shows you where community engagement is dropping off.

Lastly, User breakdown can help you identify your top contributors, emerging mentors, and internal experts. You can also use these reports to choose winners for contests such as Hackathons or Answerathons.

Need help? Submit an issue or question through our support portal.