Track engagement in Viva Engage with analytics

Viva Engage provides robust analytics to help you better understand the impact of your posts. Analytics let you monitor different analytics, based on your licensing:

Your own engagement (Answers, Conversation, and Personal analytics).
Engagement within the communities you create and manage (Community analytics).
Corporate communicators and network admins can monitor engagement across the organization (Campaign, Global answers, and Network analytics).

Notes:

Many dashboard analytics are only available to customers that have Viva Engage Premium, which is bundled in the Microsoft Viva Suite or Employee Communications and Communities (C&C) license. All Engage users have access to conversation and community analytics. For more information about licensing and admin responsibilities, see View and manage analytics in Viva Engage.
Microsoft recommends Viva Engage Premium for use by leaders, corporate communicators, and network administrators. These three roles benefit most from premium licensing choices.

Open the Analytics dashboard

Anyone who creates a post in Viva Engage can view the Analytics dashboard. Your Engage user role determines the analytics categories you can see. Users with the basic Viva Engage license can't view the Analytics dashboard.

Use the following method to open your personal analytics dashboard and to change its numeric scope:

From your storyline, select the Analytics icon below your cover photo or the link on the Personal summary tile. The Analytics page opens, showing the Personal tab.
-OR- Select the Analytics link in the Viva Engage left navigation menu.

Tip: Hover over any metric to get more information about it.
When you open the Analytics dashboard, you'll see the set of tabs for the categories of metrics you can view. As an example, Engage users with the C&C or Engage Premium license can see the Personal, Community, and Answers analytics. Different roles and licenses get different tabs.
Changing the date range is an excellent tool to scale up, or to scale down the data that gets included in analytics processing. To change the scale of the analytics view, you can select ranges for the last week, the last four weeks, the last 90 days and for the previous year. You can apply the data range feature to any Analytics tab to which you have access.

A Custom date range feature allows you to specify any date range, beginning with any calendar day and extending by any number of days. This feature is available only with Viva Engage Premium.
Each individual Analytics tab page also provides specific view filtering dropdowns. For example, in the Personal tab, you can filter the analytics view to everything you post in Communities and storyline, or just for your storyline page with Storyline only. Each tab has its own filtering menu. See the following subsections for details.

The set of an Engage user's Personal metrics.

Each user sees a varying set of Analytics tabs based on their user roles.

You can select different time ranges to scale up or scale down your analytics data, and specify custom time ranges subject to the correct licensing.

Use Storyline only to see trends for that, or use both Communities and storyline

All Engage users get analytics that show the reception of their posts and conversations, but without a Viva Engage Core license, they can't see or use the Analytics dashboard. All Microsoft 365 customers can view analytics for their communities and conversations.

For community analytics, look for the Community summary panel and select the See full community analytics link. Community admins can also see community analytics in a summary card visible on the right panel of their managed communities. For more information, see the section Community analytics.

For any conversation you create, select the More menu on the top right of the conversation and select View analytics. For more information, see the section Conversation analytics.

The Analytics page appears differently for various Engage users. What you see in the Analytics dashboard depends on your Engage licensing, which is also based upon your role in the Engage ecosystem. Admin and managerial users receive a much broader view of social reception across different Engage features, such as network-wide analytics, campaigns, and Global answers.

Leaders/Delegators: Limited to Personal and Audience tabs. Leaders and delegators typically view a limited set of metrics, since their roles involve different responsibilities.

Execs and delegators typically see a limited set of analytics.

Corporate communicators (C&C license): Personal,Community and Answers tabs.

Communicator roles get these features with the C&C license

End user (Engage Premium license): Personal, Community and Answers tabs.

Communicator roles get these features with the C&C license

Knowledge admin (Engage Premium license): Personal, Community, Answers, and Global answers tabs. See more about Entra knowledge administrators.

Knowledge admins receive this set of analytics.

Network admin and Engage admin: All tabs. Access to all features.

Network admins have full access to all features in the Analytics console

Note: The employee retention metric is visible only to Engage admins and network admins. For more details on the retention metric, see Measure employee retention with Viva Engage.

Viva Engage helps promote employee relationships and communication. Due to this element, widespread Engage usage may have a beneficial effect on employees' mutual engagement, and even on whether they stay with the company! This phenomenon is called employee retention.

To measure the influence of Viva Engage usage on employee retention, Engage's Network Analytics data set offers an employee retention metric. On a basic level, it shows the difference in 28-day retention rates between Viva Engage users and non-users. Since Viva Engage doesn’t have access to customer human resources data, Engage uses Microsoft 365 data to determine whether an employee is retained, based on whether they have a working Microsoft 365 account and actively use that account.

For more detail on how Engage calculates employee retention, see the article link in the preceding note.

Screenshot of the Retention metric and graph in Network Analytics, which shows the difference in retention rates for a cohort.

Note: Audience related metrics are visible to leaders as identified by an admin or a corporate communicator. Leaders must also have assigned audiences. Leaders can view audience analytics when there are at least 20 unique audience members. For details, see Identify leaders and manage audiences in Viva Engage.

Important: Users may have the option to opt out of AI summarization, so their comments and interaction won't factor into sentiment and themes calculation. In this situation, the Analytics dashboard might report that the isn't enough data available for computation of metrics. If admins and communicators don't see results in key features such as theme analysis, check to see if you have enough users allowing participation in AI summarization.

Audience analytics appear for leaders and delegates. To see audience analytics, the leaders must have assigned audiences. Depending on licensing, audience analytics reflect the compilation of both sentiment and theme analysis for the interested leader. As with other analytic sets, you can filter and scale the analytics values to get trends and histories for different time periods. It provides the following individual metric categories for deeper dives into Engage social engagement:

Sentiment in your audience	(Available in Viva Engage Premium) The average sentiment trend across all public posts and comments in your audience. It's measured against all instances of positive, negative and neutral feedback from your audience. Experiment with different time frames to see where the trend goes. Audience sentiment starts to be reflected in analytics when at least five people comment on a post or conversation.
Themes in your audience	(Available in Viva Engage Premium) Microsoft's large language model (LLM) technology helps extract important themes and sentiments from the cloud of engagements and responses that leaders might receive through their communications. As a result, leaders collect deeper insight from a significant number of individual themes. Themes can give the leader a better sense of what matters most to their audience, their values, and the issues they face. Select any theme from the list as shown above. Selecting a theme shows related conversations that contributed to the analysis for that specific theme, with a basic Trending graph that shows the sentiment trend associated with that theme (positive, negative or neutral). You can also select the Analytics icon under Actions to see a chart for any conversation. For more information about themes, see Communications dashboard. Tip: Use the date range dropdown to expand the sentiment and theme information. If a significant all-hands meeting takes place two weeks prior, you likely won't see it reflected in themes and sentiment data for the default 7-day time frame.
Announcement viewers	The count of audience members that see at least one announcement from the leaders' storyline or related communities during the specified timeframe.
Active community members	The count of audience members who saw at least one community post in the specified time frame.
Active on storyline	The count of audience members who've seen at least one post on your storyline.
Audience activity	Shows how many audience members saw your posts during the specified time period.
Audience engagement	Shows how many people in your audience saw your posts and responded with a reply, a comment or a reaction in the specified time frame.
Top conversations in your audience	Shows the post threads that received the most reactions, comments, and replies by your audience on storylines and in communities.
Posts by audience members	A fun chart that shows both the total number of posts from your audience and the number of active contributors, within the specified time frame.
Post types	Shows a comparison of unique audience members who are posting against how many posts got created over the specified time period by those active users.
Most active communities	Shows how audience members use the different post types in response to your communication.

Personal analytics apply directly to the Engage user who's currently studying the analytics. Your analytics information isn't visible to other users. It includes the following metrics:

Your reach	A count and charting pattern of people who view, react or comment on your posts.
Reach breakdown	A count of people who interacted with your posts or comments by viewing, reacting, or commenting.
Engaged breakdown	The percentage of people who engaged, by reacting or commenting.
Top conversations	The most popular conversations you started.
Reactions to your posts	A unique count of reactions on all your posts. All reaction types apply to the count.
Top comments on your posts	The comments on your posts with the most reactions.

To see trends, use these dashboard filters:

Filter for date range: Date ranges let you see conversation trends starting from the date a post is created and beyond. They represent changes (deltas) for the selected period. You can filter on Last 7 days, Last 28 days, Last 90 days, and Last 12 months. For example, by selecting Last 7 days, you can see the week-over-week change. Last 90 days shows quarter-over-quarter changes. Depending upon licensing, you can also apply Custom date ranges.

Filter for destination: Use this filter to include data across Communities and storyline, or for Storyline only.

Filter Personal analytics by date ranges, including a custom filter (if supported by your license)

Use Storyline only to see trends for that, or use both Communities and storyline

To understand the performance of questions and answers that users engage with, check your Answers analytics. These analytics are visible to anyone who posts or answers a question in Engage, either on the Answers tab or inside a community. Question posts are designed to improve knowledge capture. The Answers page zooms in to your own question posts so you can get a quick view of their reception and performance.

Based on Microsoft research, it takes a user, on average, 5 minutes to ask a question and 10 minutes to write an answer. In that way, a successful question and answer pair (Q&A) reflects a standard value of 15 minutes. The user doesn't need to spend time asking the same question again or waiting for someone else to respond. This conservative approach to illustrate the value of a Q&A pair doesn't account for the work that an answerer spends gathering resources and information to answer the question.

Note: Engage tracks views based on their duration (a minimum of 15 seconds) and whether there is activity such as a vote, reaction or comment. Doing so filters out ephemeral views and avoids inflating statistics and potential inaccuracy.

Use the date range menu to reduce or expand the range of data for the Answers page.

Depending upon licensing, you can also apply custom date ranges from the menu.

Answers allows filtering by date ranges, including Custom ranges if licensing supports it.

Answers analytics include the following metrics:

People you helped	Your impact based on the number of people who engaged with questions you asked or answered, based on the selected date range. It's a measurement of views by unique users on all your questions. For more information, see Answers in Viva: Understanding Time Saved & People Helped - Microsoft Community Hub.
Answers summary	Analytics for all of the Q&A pairs representing questions you answered.
Questions summary	Analytics for the questions you asked, including the views count across all of them.
Questions you engaged in	A basic breakdown of the most engaged questions you posted, asked or answered.

(Available with Viva Engage Premium) Global answers analytics provides question posts and answers metrics across all Answers submissions across the network.

Global answers information is designed for use by knowledge admins and network admins, otherwise considered power users. Global answers metrics help enable capture of trends and results for your organization's ability to share new information and adapt to shifting priorities and goals.

Use the date range menu to reduce or expand the range of data for the page.

Time saved by Answers	Measure the time saved by successfully created Q&A pairs. Provides a top 3 most helpful questions list, and a chart showing the success rates of questions and the total time saved metric. The time saved value is based upon the same 15-minute standard value for a Q&A pair as noted in the Answers metrics subsection. Here, it's cumulative across the organization. It shows the same data as the People you helped statistic in Answers, but for everyone.
Engagements breakdown	A collection of metrics for Answers engagement. It includes counts of the number of Questions and their total views; the count of total Answers and Answers marked as the best, successful answers; a set of Knowledge velocity metrics, and the User summary, which shows the number of users who sought to get answers to their questions. Knowledge velocity is a set of engagement metrics that tries to measure the social speed at which knowledge spreads and gets used in your organization. It helps illustrate how quickly your user base discovers, shares, and accepts new insights into business strategies and operations. High knowledge velocity encourages agile, innovative, and competitive organizations, because it ensures that past successes and failures inform business activity.
Top questions across your org	The most heavily interacted questions (essentially, the most popular) in your organization.
User engagement distribution and Question views	Engagement distribution measures the number of people who are reached on a basic level (visit/view) against those who fully engage in one or more question posts. Questions views measures rate of responses to a question post over time.

Go to any conversation in Viva Engage, select the More icon, and choose View analytics. You can also select the Seen by count that appears on all threads.

Note: Some users may notice that Engage analytics client breakdown information doesn't work as expected. This issue affects the client breakdown metrics available in network analytics and conversation analytics for Viva Engage Premium customers. Experiences such as Viva Engage on Teams may inaccurately display low engagement. Missing engagement appears as "Web" client engagement. Our engineering team is working to fix this issue.

Conversation analytics are a real-time breakdown of Viva Engage posting activity and include data from conversation starters, articles, polls, praise, and more. Conversation analytics update in real time, so posts with significant engagement receive immediate data updates.

Post creators, their delegates, and corporate communicators can view conversation analytics.
Corporate communicators can also see detailed analytics for conversations in public groups.
Community admins can view conversation analytics for the communities they manage.

Screenshot shows conversation trends, post activities, and other metrics in the dashboard for conversation analytics.

Conversation analytics also includes AI-driven sentiment and theme analysis, focused on the communications from people in the conversation.

You'll need at least five individual comments in the conversation to derive enough context for the AI-driven analysis.

Conversation analytics include the following metrics:

People reached	The number of people who viewed, reacted or replied.
People engaged	The number of people who reacted or replied to the selected conversation.
Engagement funnel	The types of engagement happening on your post. Includes detailed conversation-specific activities like bookmarks and shares.
Conversation trends	Total users who view, react and comment to the post in the selected time frame. In the case where a conversation is featured or pinned within an Engage community, you'll see those actions represented in the graph. High spikes in engagement for a conversation often reflect those actions, so this table measures their effect. The chart helps show the lifespan of a thread and the timing of engagement (its peaks and valleys).
Reactions breakdown	Total reactions and the type of reactions (Like, Love, and so on) used.
Top comments on post	An overview of the most engaged comments on the post. It illustrates whose comments are the most popular and had the greatest impact. It's also helpful when an idea or issue appears with a lot of responses to understand where you may need to respond to someone's comment or address a concern that appears in a post.
Shares	Shows how and where this post has been shared. Metrics in this table relate to the new post created upon share.

Conversation analytics include the following metrics for Viva Engage Premium users:

Advanced people reached and engaged

Percentage of followers and the audience or community reached, depending on where the post is created. If a post is created within a community, the community reach metric appears. If a post is created on storyline, the followers reached metric appears. If the post is created on storyline by a leader, the audience reached metric appears.

Activities by platform

Platforms that comments, reactions, and views come from.

Sentiment in comments

Average sentiment across all comments in post. This metric is only available on posts with at least five unique commentors. For details, see Sentiment and theme analysis in Viva Engage.

Screenshot of premium conversation metrics.

Screenshot of premium conversation metric.

Community analytics help community members and admins understand their Engage community’s engagement trends. Any Viva Engage network member can see insights for public communities. Community members can see insights for private communities. Community admins in premium licensed networks can see advanced analytics such as Time saved, People helped, Frequent contributors and Dormant conversations.

Community analytics shouldn't be overlooked. Communities are the functional core of Engage networks. They are also a significant enterprise engagement function in Microsoft Teams, and your communities operate exactly the same way in Engage and in Teams.

For communities, admin engagement is a key to maintaining thriving communities. That's because measuring the impact and engagement of admins helps show when a community is set up to succeed. Microsoft's findings indicate that communities with high admin engagement in the first 3-4 months after community creation are more successful than those without it. The best active communities typically have several engaged admins; delegating management responsibilities can pay big dividends here.

Filter community analytics by the standard date ranges, and by the Communities dropdown menu.

By default, the Communities tab opens showing metrics for the first community on the list.

Select a community for seeing its analytics

Visit any community and select the Analytics icon in the community header to open community analytics. You can also view community analytics through the Analytics > Community tab.

Community admins can also see community analytics in a summary card visible on the right panel of their managed communities.

Community analytics include the following features and metrics definitions:

Date range selector	All subsequent metrics apply to the selected date.
Member activity	Displays an overview of community member and admin activity. Community Member count doesn't include admins. It will differ from the member count shown on the main community feed. The community admin activity is reported separately, reflecting the number of admins in the community, their response rate, and the number of admins, as a percentage, that regularly engage.
Members/Admins/People Engaged	Total unique users that react, comment or post content in the community.
Members/Admins/People Reached	Total of unique users that saw community content.
Admin response rate	Displays the rate of posts (thread starters) with community admin replies.
Total posts	Displays a breakdown of posts (thread starters) that were created within the community.
Views on posts	Displays counts of views across all posts (thread starters only). This count isn't unique, since a user can revisit a post and register as another view. Counts in private groups and All Company only include member and admin engagement.
Messages posted	Displays the count of posted messages, including thread starters and replies. Counts in private groups and All Company only include member and admin engagement.
Reactions on messages	Displays the count of reactions on messages, including thread starters and replies. Counts in private groups and All Company only include member and admin engagement.
Answer and Best answer rate	Displays the percent of questions that receive answers, and the percent of questions marked as best answers within the community.
Top conversations	Displays posts (thread starters) with the most reactions, comments and replies in the community. These conversations are only visible to admins, corporate communicators and members of the community. External guests and other external network users won't be authorized to see the contents in this table.
Deltas	All percent increase/decrease changes are based on the date selection. Examples: for 7-day periods, delta shows week over week changes. For 28-day periods, the delta shows month over month changes.

Community analytics include the following metrics in Viva Engage Premium:

Sentiment	Average sentiment across all posts in the community. This metric appears for communities with at least 20 members and five unique posters. For more details, see Sentiment and theme analysis in Viva Engage.
Posts and sentiment	When AI Summarization is enabled, this set of metrics shows total users who posted, and sentiment trends across the community. Scoped to a single community within community analytics. For details, see Sentiment and theme analysis in Viva Engage. To manage AI summarization for the network or for individuals, see AI summarization in Viva Engage
Trending themes in your community	AI Summarization also shows the most popular themes discussed across your community. It's scoped to a single community within community analytics.
People helped	Displays the count of unique users who reacted, voted and replied to Q&A conversations within the community.
Time saved	Calculates this value based on research that answered questions save the average person approximately 15 minutes by reducing search times. The time saved value is based upon the same 15-minute standard value for a Q&A pair as noted in the Answers metrics subsection.
Dormant conversations	Displays community posts that met with no engagement.
Unanswered questions	Displays questions without any posted answers.
Frequent contributors	Displays users who create the most content within the community.
New members	Displays users who recently joined the community.

Notes:

You can export the data for any time range into a .CSV format file by selecting the Export button at the top of your community analytics dashboard.
Corporate communicators can view conversation analytics from public communities.

Note: Some users may notice that Engage analytics client breakdown information doesn't work as expected. This issue affects client breakdown metrics available in network analytics and conversation analytics for Viva Engage Premium customers. Experiences such as Viva Engage on Teams may inaccurately display low engagement. Missing engagement appears as "Web" client engagement. Our engineering team is working to fix this issue.

Network analytics help network admins and corporate communicators understand the performance of the Engage network. To get more detailed analysis, you can also filter these insights by their organizational attributes. For details on managing network analytics, see View and manage analytics in Viva Engage.

Leaders, and admins of communities, can make announcements. Network analytics offers unique Announcement analytics, targeted to the few key people in your organization that need to know the impact of strategic and important communications.

Network analytics include the following metrics:

Enabled licenses	The number of licensed users with Viva Engage enabled as a service.
Activated Users	The number of people who visited Viva Engage at least once in the past 18 months.
People reached	The number of people who viewed, reacted or replied.
People engaged	The number of people who reacted or replied.
People posted	The number of people who posted on Viva Engage.
Engagement benchmarks	The percentile comparison of your network’s engagement rate compared to organizations of a similar size. Benchmarking helps you understand comparative performance at the global and individual level. Leaders can see how their member engagement compares with other leaders in the organization. Admins can enable and disable these benchmarks in the admin center.
Engagement breakdown	The types of engagement happening across your network. Engagement includes posts, comments, and reactions. Total engagements is an aggregate of all posts, comments, and reactions made during the selected period.
Activities by platforms	Shows the clients where activity occurs. If we don't have enough information to classify a client, an engagement is logged as Others. Similarly, if the exact client where engagement occurs isn’t logged in our data streams, we’ll log user activity as Others. An example of how this can happen is when an organization uses an API or embedding to expose the Engage feed to users.
Posts and sentiment	When AI Summarization is enabled, this set of metrics shows total users who have posted, total posts, and sentiment trends across the content. For details, see Sentiment and theme analysis in Viva Engage.
Trending themes in your network	Enabling AI Summarization also shows the most popular themes discussed in your network. For details, see Sentiment and theme analysis in Viva Engage.
Announcements breakdown	An overview of announcement activity and effectiveness across your network includes location split of announcements made via storyline vs communities. It also shows an overview of people reached, people engaged, median time to first view and median time to first reaction for the selected period. Announcements can be shared to community members, assigned audiences, and the leader’s followers. On average, announcements get 5x more readers, 2x more commenters and 1.4x more reactors than regular posts. They also work as a way to get users into the Engage experience. On average, 11% or organizational views occur immediately after an announcement.
Median Announcement effectiveness	An overview of announcement activity across your network includes location split of announcements made via storyline vs communities. It also shows an overview of people reached, people engaged, median time to first view and median time to first reaction for the selected period. See the following subsection for more details.
Frequent contributors	Shows who creates the most posts across the network.
Top conversations	Shows posts with the most activity. You can sort by views, reactions, comments or announcements only.
Popular communities	Shows communities with the most activity. You can sort by posts, comments, views per member and engaged members. Engaged members are those who react or post a message within the community.
Trending campaigns	Shows campaigns with the most activity. You can sort by views, comments and reactions.

Note: To export the data for any time range into a .CSV format file, select the Export button at the top of the Network analytics dashboard.

Campaign analytics give Engage admins and corporate communicators performance metrics for official Engage campaigns. For details on managing these analytics, see View community insights in Viva Engage. It's advisable for those who develop and launch campaigns to recognize those who respond to the campaign, particularly with frequent contributors and those who offer further content for the campaign.

Two unique features for campaign analytics are the Campaign followers breakdown and Campaign leaders breakdown. The Campaign followers bar chart shows a breakdown of engagements by campaign followers. It shows how many followers go beyond just following the campaign and actually engaging in different actions. Campaign leaders breakdown is especially useful if you have senior leaders sponsoring a campaign and you need to understand the depth of engagement for those leaders.

Filter campaign analytics by the standard date ranges, and by the Campaigns dropdown menu. By default, the Campaign tab opens showing metrics for the first campaign on the list.

Campaign analytics tracks the following metrics:

People reacted	The number of people who react to a post with the campaign hashtag.
People commented	The number of people who comment on a post with the campaign hashtag.
People posted	The number of people who create a post using the campaign hashtag.
People reached	The number of people who view, react or reply to a post using the campaign hashtag. Campaign reach is the total number of all engagements of every type, including view, reactions, replies and posts.
Followers	The number of people who follow a campaign.
Total posts	Shows how many posts included a campaign hashtag out of the total number of posts made. List can be sorted by location of most posts or location with most views.
Top conversations	Shows the conversations with the most activity. Can be sorted by views, comments, or reactions.
Campaign followers breakdown	Shows engagement funnel of campaign followers, including totals of their follows and activities. Some categories won't display with fewer than five participants. Can be filtered to view activity of only the leader (as defined on Engage).
Reactions from people	Shows total reaction split by reaction type.

Note: Storyline for Teams is separate and distinct from the Viva Engage experience for Teams. Storyline is a single-tab feature for Microsoft Teams that brings users' primary Engage social interface to their Teams communications app. You don't have to run the Viva Engage app on Teams to use this feature.

Storyline for Teams (separate from the Viva Engage app for Teams) provides the same set of tools and features to follow and interact with colleagues. Open a new chat session with yourself and the Storyline tab appears, showing your profile.

From the More menu beneath the cover photo, select View profile analytics.

Teams Storyline menu for opening analytics