Discord Communities Metrics Landscape
Start where your members are. Step into their shoes before you start tracking anything.
Time to experiment. You’ve seen Discourse and Slack, now it’s time to wrap up the trio. Buckle up!
Where to start
The same as with Discourse and Slack, you’ll want to start by answering a few key questions. The kind that help you figure out what to track and why. Here are some examples to get you thinking:
What kind of people are joining your server, and where are they coming from?
How are they finding your community and what’s their onboarding experience like?
What helps them quickly understand why your community is worth their time, and what keeps them around for the long haul?
What are members actually doing once they’re in?
Where are the main conversations happening?
Are you attracting high-intent members (vs. random passersby)?
Ultimately, your goal is to keep activating and delivering value to as many members as possible consistently. That’s what a strong dev community is built on.
And this is where Server Insights start to earn their place.
Tooling Intro
Once your community hits 500 members, you unlock a hidden Discord feature, that I’ve just mentioned. Server Insights.
The goal of this tool is simple: help you understand your community through data and direct your efforts toward what actually helps it grow.
But what can you actually track?
Server Insights Essentials
Quite a few things, actually. Let’s start with the big ones, then we’ll move to the bare essentials.
IMPORTANT ONES
Growth & Activation
New Members
Total membership over time
Server leaves over time
How many new members successfully activate on their first day
Engagement
Total Messages Sent
Audience
How long have they been a member of the server
BARE ESSENTIALS
Communicators: server members that has talked on the server (posting in text channels or talking in Voice channels) commonly known as your active users (in Discord’s terms: sent at least one message or viewed at least three channels)
New Member Retention: percentage of new members that return to your server after a week
Referrers - Dev Community Gold
Server Invite Links. This is the one you’ll want to pay close attention to. It gives you a clear view of your most popular invite links and top referrers. That, in turn, helps you see who’s actually fueling your growth so you can double down on what’s working.
You can find more about invites here. There’s plenty of room to get creative with this. Think about building a light referral or recommendation system around it. And hey, maybe throw in a bit of company swag for your top referrers while you’re at it.
What about data retention
When it comes to how far back you can look, Discord’s data availability breaks down like this:
For non-Partner and Verified servers: 120 days back
For Partner and Verified servers: back to the point at which your server was Verified or Partnered
What’s next
We’ve spent some time digging into the developer community side of things, now it’s time to switch gears. Next week, we’ll dive into some developer marketing and developer experience topics (including hedgehogs).
But before that…
This Saturday, I’m opening a new section in my newsletter called Weekly Goodies - short, under-two-minute reads covering the best dev marketing and DevRel insights we’ve come across that week.
Stay tuned 🫡