Compare customers that are engaged in the community versus customers that are not across pipeline, ACV (Annual Contract Value), product adoption, and attrition.

The rate of repeat questions in the support channels decreasing over time or number of articles created.

DevRel Qualified Leads are connections passed along to the right team in hopes that together, they will be able to accomplish a task that furthers the overarching company goals.

Member-generated content index: amount of content produced by the community, weighted by length/depth.

One way to demonstrate the impact of community activities is by calculating Natural Rate of Growth (NRG) and showing how community and DevRel contribute. NRG = 100 x Annual Growth Rate x % Organic Signups X % ARR from Products

Time to First Hello World (TTFHW): The longer a developer takes to get started with your platform, the less likely they will be successful.

Measuring everything is only slightly better than measuring nothing. Pick one KPI and do it well.

DevRel cannot be held responsible for the final outcome, whether that is a guest post, a partnership, a new hire or a converted customer. The value DevRel delivers is the connection itself—the opportunity for marketing or product or sales or another team to transform the DevRel qualified lead into a valuable business asset. That’s what you have to measure.

Having community insights at hand in GitHub issues and PRs is a great way to direct my open source efforts to new and/or inexperienced contributors, improving their contributing experience.

Measuring the traffic to your developer portal (e.g. page views) is an important way to get a sense of how to be more effective at creating developer-friendly docs.

You can't measure that which you don't record. One of the most valuable lessons I've learned about developer advocacy, or devrel in general, is that tracking the work you do is fundamental to your success.

Number of pull requests submitted, open, and accepted (and length of time they remain open).

The number of high-value leads (actively engaged open-sorcerers) contributing to your open source projects sometimes trumps high-volume leads. It is an excellent #DevRel KPI metric.

For the most part, goals fall into one of three broad categories: awareness, revenue and developer experience.

Arm share: 'Raise your hand if you're heard of X' (count the number of arms you see)

I think using metrics as a way to inform the trend is good. Using them as the only method of success leads you to trouble.

Compare customers that are engaged in the community versus customers that are not across pipeline, ACV (Annual Contract Value), product adoption, and attrition.

At JFrog, measuring face-to-face comes back to how well it feeds into online activity. “The first goal is to bring people online because from there we can actually measure.“

Revenue is a natural second-order effect of high gravity. With communities, as gravity increases, more users will end up in the adoption funnel.

You don’t need everything you do to build community to be tied to revenue.

It’s okay to do things just to build the community and trust that the value will show up in ways you can’t measure.

In fact, it’s a requirement in order to build real community.

KPIs make sense when you have a set of action points that depend on the numbers you get - here's a fable of what happens when a manager asks for KPIs just because they need something.

If the metrics change and you don't, stop measuring it. If you're not taking action in response to the metric going up or down (or qualitative getting better or worse), then you shouldn't be measuring it. You're wasting effort, and other functions will be more aware than you think.

Number of sales calls attended when technical members of the prospect need to learn more about the technical aspects of the product.

Signup-to-Active ratio.

Community managers should track the Love and Reach of their community as well as the distribution of Orbit levels, and the change in each over time.

Community activation: what % of product users join the community?

Weekly Active API Tokens: The mere act of generating an API key does not measure usage since even non-developers can view API keys without any real use for them. Since most APIs limit access to authenticated users, we are able to track how many distinct tokens are accessing our API platform on a given week.

Number of unanswered questions / answered, weekly or monthly.

I believe that how many developers did we help is a very good way to measure success.

The mission of a developer relations team following the orbit model is to facilitate high-quality word-of-mouth exchanges.

Developer marketing KPIs and DevRel KPIs are different. According to our survey, the top 2 DevRel KPIs were: 1. Registered developers accounts (48%) 2. Developer satisfaction score (48%).

On the other hand, the top 2 KPIs for developer marketing were: 1. Page or video views (55%) 2. Unique visitors or IP addresses (54%)

View the full results in the source below.

Don't measure that which is already counted. If you try to use metrics that are already owned by another team/function, then you run the risk of: 1) competing against a team you should be impacting, 2) never being able to produce the same results as a team dedicated to that metric, and 3) Doing the same work that another function already does well.

Not all metrics are equally trusted. It turns out, the more degrees of separation between your metric and your company's north start metric (generally revenue related), the less likely it is to be trusted. Just because you show a report doesn't mean others trust the associated impact on the business. Sometimes you have to build trust in your metrics.